


Tattoos of memories

by cmorgana



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes Has Panic Attacks, Bucky slips back into the Winter Soldier, Happy Ending, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Nightmares, Past Abuse, Past Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad, alternate POV, mention of medical experiments, mention of past torture, vague mention of past rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-11 21:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15980981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmorgana/pseuds/cmorgana
Summary: After "The Winter Soldier", how that moment of recognition in the Winter Soldier's eyes changed everything. Bucky's fight to get his brain and his memories back, while fighting his past as an assassin. Steve's fight not to let guilt eat him alive and his need to hunt down Bucky just to hold him.While both fight to find back the another on many levels and learn they can't really stay far away.Alternate POV, one chapter each.2“I’m the Winter Soldier. I am a super soldier and I belong to HYDRA. I have no feelings, I’m a killing machine and anything different than protocols or useful data must be wiped from my memories,” he told aloud, fixing his eyes in the ones of his own reflex.”I am Bucky, you are Bucky. Steve’s best friend 'till the end of the line.”3By that point, Steve was sure he could even put up with having a killing machine around his house if it meant knowing Bucky was okay, if it meant to know that he was still trapped behind cold and unblinking eyes but alive somewhere in there.





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, long note this time,but please read. 
> 
> It's my first work in the MCU, maybe the last, who knows. I know the characters are a little...softer...that they should be, expecially Bucky, but I decided I could cut him so slack since he's so confused and scared.  
> This fic is a lot more darker than anything I've ever published, I didn't even want to post it, because seriously? It deals with terrible nightmares about atrocious things they did to Bucky, with pain and abuse and even rape! But in the end I like what I've written and my friends told me I should post it, even if it's so dark (but with some fluffy scenes, I promise), so here I am, and I assure I am blushing more than Steve the first time Bucky kissed him out of the blue (because I'm sure that happened, lol). Well, by now I guess I warned you enough that you are able to skip this fic if you have violence-related triggers. (if you need me to add tags or if you want to ask if a specific trigger is in the fic please let me know!)
> 
> I also wanted to say that I know little about PTSD, I read a little to write this fic, and the anxiety/panic attacks are based on my own, but I don't assume I totally know what I'm talking about, so if you have PTSD and I'm portraying you in the wrong way know that I'm sorry and I don't want to offend you in any way.
> 
> This fic is basically finished (I'll finish it tonight or tomorrow afternoon) and I'm editing it, so I should be quick enough to post it. English is not my first language by far, forgive me if you see something terrible ;)
> 
> On the bright side the first chapter is the less traumatic, aren't you happy? But let's admit it, hurt!Bucky is cutest than a wet puppy, especially when it's related to Steve and he thinks he hates him ;)

He was alive. Most important Bucky was alive. Bucky was the reason he still was, and that meant that Bucky was more than physically alive. But somehow that felt worse than when he was just mourning him. 

He had faced Bucky, his best friend. He had fought him. Except he had been a HYDRA agent. An enemy. Someone who had killed people for the last 50 years. 

Yet, no. Steve knew he had faced two different persons. He had fought the Winter Soldier but he had looked into Bucky’s eyes at some point. Even Natasha seemed to just bear with him, to indulge him as if that had something to do with his stupid physical wounds, with the irrelevant fact that he had been so close to dying. Fury probably thought him plain out of his mind, Steve wouldn’t have marvelled if, even now that SHIELD was no more, he’d have sent someone to evaluate him, to check he was still worth something. 

Sam was the only one apparently believing him to some extent. Probably because Sam knew everything about loss. Maybe because, after all, he was the most similar to Steve. Both soldiers, only that. Steve had never asked to be the hero, to be the topic of expositions. To be found in ice and brought back to a world he wasn’t ready to face. Not to Penny like that. But above all not without Bucky. Never without Bucky. 

He felt like his mind was going to explode, it had nothing to do with some stupid trauma, with a perforated liver, some scratches…they didn’t matter, as hadn’t mattered the opinion of doctors wanting to keep him in that bed, in that hospital. He’d never been good at staying in hospitals. Not when he had been a sick kid, definitely not as a super soldier. Maybe it had been more bearable as a kid, at that time Bucky had always been at his bedside, holding his hand, a crease of worry on his forehead but a brave smile on his lips. 

That had been one of the reasons he had left the hospital. He loved Sam, but he wasn’t Bucky, it had hurt to see him near his bed. He needed that smile, that so badly hidden worry, he didn't need to see a pale shadow of it on someone's else face. Steve would have traded anything to open his eyes and see his Bucky instead than Sam. Steve would trade that new, strong, body to his old, faulty one in one second if it meant to be in his deathbed but with Bucky at his side. 

But there was no trade, there was no Bucky, just his mind replaying images like they were an old movie. Not one of those stupid B movies Natasha was so fond of, loving to make fun of them. No, one of the movies he had watched as a kid, with no CGI, just bad cardboard but that somehow was a lot scarier and a lot more emotional to him. 

So no matter how much he punched a bag, how much his body screamed in pain, how his hands bleed and how tired he was, his damn brain kept feeding him the same thoughts over and over. 

The same two things: the Winter Soldier and Bucky. Except they were one, and that somehow made his head throb even more. 

He kept going back at that fight, that last fight. 

What have they done at his Bucky? He had broken his arm and he had barely screamed, he hadn’t even let go of the hold on that damn card. How much pain should someone be used to endure to react like that? Sure, Steve knew all about pain and about keep fighting, at that same moment he had been hurt and then he had fought with a bullet in his guts, but he had been trying to save the world, which felt like something slightly more important than a mission. Just a little bit more personal. And maybe, just maybe, he should’ve admitted that at the same moment he had also been trying to get his head around the fact that he was fighting Bucky, who was then an enemy. Yeah, thinking about that Steve couldn’t really wonder why he hadn’t succumbed to pain.

Bucky, instead…no, the Winter Soldier. He had never broken Bucky’s arm, because there had been no trace of Bucky in those eyes, at that moment. Oh, he knew. The images in his head kept showing him every tiny change in the features he knew so well and there was no Bucky behind the hateful stare. 

How do you get someone to ignore pain and to forget who he is? How do you turn someone so full of life as Bucky into…into a killing machine? 

Steve had seen those eyes. On the bridge, the street, up there… they were empty, everything behind them deleted as some old file. Steve couldn’t deny he had faced a machine, an asset, another weapon, nothing more. He’d want so badly to deny, to ignore, to stop the bile rising in his throat at every moment, but he couldn’t. 

Because to deny he had faced little more than an object would mean denying that, instead, at some point, Bucky had taken a little space behind those eyes. Because to deny he had fought a machine would mean to deny the fight Bucky was probably keeping up just to stay alive in there somewhere. 

It had been around 70 years, Barnes had been turned into the perfect soldier, into a machine. He had killed people, even innocent people, he had gotten used to pain and mutilation as if it was nothing. He had embraced being nothing, not a human being, and yet all it took had been his presence, Steve’s face, to bring Bucky back even if for a second. If Bucky wasn’t a survivor Steve didn’t know who was. 

The images kept invading his brain, his mind, his sight as if he was still there, in the sky. 

He thought back at the Soldier under that damn beam or whatever it was, Steve hadn’t really cared at the moment. He had grunted. Crushed under hundreds of pounds of metal, his broken arm trapped and squashed, and the Soldier had only grunted, almost resigned. Steve didn’t know how many years of coercion, pain and brainwashing could bring, and keep, someone at that point, what kind of experiments could make a body resilient enough not to just break, probably as much enduring as his own. What Steve knew was that it was probably going to broke him the moment he was to find out. Because he was to find out, that was for sure. He had one single reason to: for a moment the eyes in the perfect machine had shown fear. The weapon didn’t care about dying, you don’t if you’re not alive in the first place, but Bucky did. For a moment Steve had seen that fear Bucky never before had shown for himself. For a moment they’d been the eyes of the young man sitting near his hospital bed. It didn’t matter that the Soldier had put him down again a second later. That had been the moment Steve had decided to let down his defences. They were going to die on that thing, they had both known that, but Steve had been alright with that if only he could have done it with Bucky at his side. That had been the moment the only relevant mission of his life had become to get Bucky free of that virtual prison, to let him die free. To die together. 

'Till the end of the line. 

Steve had to be honest with himself: that mission hadn’t been very difficult. The moment the Soldier had been out of the weight crushing him, the moment rage swelled in him, Steve had known he had already won. 

A machine doesn’t feel anger. A machine doesn’t attack out of rage, without thinking. The moment the Soldier had been on his own two feet Steve had known he had won and HYDRA had lost. That he had partly known that rage burning deep, that he had been familiar with it, had just been a bonus. He had seen a pale shadow of it in the past, but he had seen it. Never directed at him, obviously, but often at those who were really trying to hurt him, with more than fists and bruises, the ones that had aimed to the core, not the too thin body. 

It had been so easy from there on. Pain had no longer mattered – and to be honest, that scared him even more if he thought of how much took him not to feel pain and how normal it had instead been for the Soldier – the punches just a minor annoyance while he watched Bucky, his Bucky, fight behind those empty eyes. He hadn’t cared about dying, it’s not like he cared about living so much either, he had probably even forgotten he had been about to, lost in that feeling of seeing his friend win a lost battle.  
However, Steve must admit it wasn’t that now keeping him awake at night, keeping his stomach empty and his hand shaking. 

The victory he had seen had been nothing compared to the sheer shock, and horror and desperation he had read in Bucky’s eyes – oh yes, his eyes for real, no HYDRA in them, no Soldier, just Bucky – before he had fallen. He had seen the exact moment his Bucky had realized the monster he had become. The moment Bucky’s mind had caught up with what those people had done to him for seven decades. 

Steve didn’t remember about the fall, or the cold water, or the almost drowning. He remembered nothing but those hunted eyes. Has it been worth it? 

He felt acid climb up his throat once more, he dries retched. He felt himself cry once more, but he literally had no more tears. 

Those eyes. That unintelligible pain. 

Steve felt guilty of the worst crime. 

Had he really saved his friend or he had just resuscitated him to inflict on him a never-ending torture?

Bucky had been dead, buried so deep inside that HYDRA asset that for 70 years he hadn’t even fought, he had just sat there, in the dark, uncaring. 

But now…now Steve had forced him out, had forced him to share his body with what he had become, and, even worse, he had forced him to share a mind, memories, fears, traumas, with what he had been turned into. 

One second had been enough for Steve to see that, to haunt him, so what was Bucky facing at that moment? What had Steve condemned him to? 

Apparently, he still had a few tears remaining, after all, because he felt them slide on his face. It was still sore but he cherished it, it was the only tangible sign that Bucky still existed. And that sign was there to haunt him. 

Bucky, his Bucky was out there, alone, still sharing a body and a mind with the Soldier and as if it wasn’t enough they had destroyed the most of HYDRA, so the Soldier had nothing to go back to. Maybe…maybe if HYDRA had still been there they’d have retrieved their asset and they’d have done whatever it was they did to keep Bucky away, imprisoned in his own mind. Maybe that would have given Steve the time to find him, to save him and bring him back somehow differently. 

But HYDRA was no more, whoever gave orders to the Winter Soldier probably had been killed by Natasha or Fury, and Bucky was there, alone with…something…that only relies on orders to exist, orders that were no longer coming and maybe Bucky was still too weak to take command, he probably was at the mercy of the Soldier’s confusion to add to his own horror. 

And Steve could do nothing. Steve had passed out and hadn’t seen him leave. Steve had no idea, no clue, of where to start to search for him. For someone who’d been a ghost since forever.


	2. 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter ;) I may have a soft spot for Bucky, or for tormenting him, not sure.
> 
> Warning: in the flashback there's what someone could take as a hint to rape, it's really just a hint and it's open to interpretaion, but I feel like warning you anyway. The flashback also contains explicit violence and mention of blood.

He had dragged Captain America out of the Potomac, because…no, he couldn’t think of a good reason to deliberately fail a mission. To actually save his half-dead mission after he had basically already finished it, the great hero slowly drowning. He hadn’t had a reason if not a strange pull at the back of his brain. One that, apparently, wasn’t letting go of him even hours later.

He had then gone to his extraction point, vaguely thinking of the consequences of such a betrayal, of failing a mission. He had never failed before, he had no idea what that really meant. But at the planned place there had been no one to take him back. He had been certain that couldn’t be his punishment for failing, he was too much of an asset, HYDRA had spent too much time and money working on their resource to just leave him behind. And then, you don’t just leave a dangerous weapon where everyone can find it, no, you take it back or you destroy it. For a second the Soldier had thought if he was about to be terminated. Still, it hadn’t been the time for such thoughts, the most important HYDRA’s plot had been sabotaged and he had concurred in that failing: he hadn’t been able to kill Captain America. 

So, breaking his protocol, and wondering for just an instant if that too had something to do with that nagging feeling, even if he had been forcing himself to ignore he was actually feeling something, anything, he had gone to the bank, to the vault where he had been kept in the last few days, just to found the place swiped clean, no trace of HYDRA. Maybe their enemies, his enemies, had really terminated HYDRA. Maybe he had really been left alone, a useless weapon. Probably he should have destroyed himself before he could fall in the hands of the SHIELD or whoever was there now. But even then that strange data error in his brain had kept telling him it was okay, that it was a good thing, that he was now free. 

The Soldier hadn’t understood that concept: freedom. So he had just started to run, until he had finally reached one of the safe houses, probably out of instinct. That had been safe, there had always been a protocol telling that in some cases he could use his instinct – if he had one at that moment – to finish a mission. Getting there he hadn’t broken any rule. Getting there he hadn’t listened to the voice in his head. 

He had known the safe house was actually safe. No HYDRA possession was in the data that Captain America and his friend had, surely, already found by then.

He had also expected to find it empty, he had known that with only the soldiers left they had for sure already skipped town, but when he had gotten there, when he had seen it really was empty something had felt like it was loosening in his stomach. He had identified the feeling as relief, but he hadn’t understood it, nor what could have been the cause of such a sensation. 

In the end, there he was, alone in the apartment. No one to handle him, to ask him a report of the mission. No one to give him orders or to wipe clean what was going on in his brain, that certainty that he actually knew Captain America. No. That couldn’t be, he had just been his mission, he hadn’t seen him before if not on files and other missions reports. The problem was that he was by then sure he, knew the guy under the mask, instead, that he had already met him. 

Steve. 

He racked his brain but could find no data about the man as a civilian. 

_“'till the end of the line.”_

That sentence kept repeating in his mind, almost similar to his activation codes, and it had actually activated something in him, some strange code apparently embedded in his brain deeper than anything HYDRA had put in there. But it was something that had made him soft, that was making him vulnerable. That was causing fear and doubts. Blinding panic. Yet he knew he didn’t actually know panic, confusion and desperation, only to recognize them on his targets’ faces, so how could he be feeling something nonexistent? 

Lost in his thoughts he realized after a while he was standing in the middle of the room, that he had been for a long time, probably more than one hour. That wasn’t going to work. If he had no one doing maintenance for him he was going to have to do it himself. 

The first thing he had to do was to assess the damage. That step he knew, finally something easy and familiar, something he had already done a million times while on a mission. 

His arm was broken, no much to assess there. It had been a clean fracture, as if his target hadn’t wanted to make more damage than strictly necessary, but when that structure had fallen on him the bone had actually shattered. Fortuitously that wasn’t going to be a problem. Something painful, sure, but not permanent damage. And his pain mattered to no one, not even himself. He had been taught to endure pain, physical pain was part of what he was. He even had a distant memory, something they hadn’t wiped off, wanting him to keep it, as seen his exposed and shattered bones knitting back together. He remembered it had taken four excruciating days tied to that chair. He still remembered the pain, the kind that takes your breath away, but it hadn’t been important because it had been the proof that that specific kind of wound wouldn’t have left permanent damage to the precious asset. 

Today was different, though. The memories of such pain, mixed to the fresh, actual one he was feeling, were making him shudder. Were making him weak. Were making him want to curl down and cry. Something in him was screaming for a friendly touch, for a friendly hand on his back, his face….no, it was screaming for Steve’s hand. 

He brought his hands to cover his ears. He wanted for that voice to shut up, he wanted for the feelings to crawl back where they couldn’t hurt him, where he could forget them. No wonder his targets were often so weak and vulnerable if that was what always passed through their head. Why should he need someone to touch him? Why should he feel the need to curl up on the floor?

The Soldier forced himself to focus back on the damages. A few broken ribs, but his lungs were okay, not perforated or collapsed, or he wouldn’t have gotten there. Or on the shore. A few days of mild pain while breathing: irrelevant to any mission. There was some minor damage to his metal arm, but nothing he couldn’t fix himself, and some cuts and bruises that he didn’t even consider and that were already repairing themselves. 

The problem was what to do now that he had checked his overall status. He had no one to communicate it, and it was alright, something he had already established, but he also didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to wipe that face from his brain. That blond hair and baby blue eyes. That name, Steve. The damn sentence still echoing in his ears. 

_'till the end of the line_

Metal fist closed so tight for a second he wondered if he could actually indent his own hand, he decided the next step was to get cleaned up. He couldn’t go outside covered in blood and dirt and he was definitely going to have to find someone from HYDRA to take him back. 

He got out of his armor, and if he flinched, if he groaned in pain and there were tears in his eyes, well, no one was there to see it. Just him. And the presence in his head that seemed to rejoice of such a terrible weakness. Even if they were all negative and horrible feelings the man behind his eyes seemed to embrace them, to bathe in them like they were the sun after a long winter. 

Such terrible, useless, human feelings. 

The Soldier forced himself to remember he wasn’t human. The other presence was. How had Captain America called him? James Buchanan Barnes. No, it had been another the name he had repeated over and over. Bucky, Buck. that was the name of the boy scratching at his head from the inside, sabotaging him. 

He stepped under the shower, the cold water forced his muscles to tense and his broken bones to hurt more, a jolt of pain ran through him. He didn’t care. He didn’t know any different. Cold showers in half-abandoned compounds or a hose before going back to cryo or the chair were all he knew. But something hit him, harder than any physical blow he had ever suffered. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, but it didn’t stop. It was a flash, it was something like a movie but behind his closed eyelids. 

Warmer water, peeling walls and pipes, nothing new, but a strange feeling…something light… something he couldn’t classify. It was good it was… belonging. The word slipped from his lips. It was a place he belonged to even with the mould and the warm water coming and going. He could remember relaxed muscles and…there was something else, distant but not far away. Someone was humming. A male voice. _Steve_ , the voice in his mind supplied.

The Soldier screamed. He wasn’t even aware he had fallen on his knees, the icy water hitting his back. 

“GO AWAY! Leave me alone! Who are you?” He shouted to the empty room. The feelings had gotten even stranger as if somehow they really belonged to him. 

“I can’t leave you alone, you know who I am. I am you and you are me,” the voice seemed to answer, and the Soldier could remember nothing more painful than those few seconds. He shook his head, he wasn’t going to admit something like that.   
He basically crawled out of the shower, uncaring of shutting down the water, and used the sink to get on his feet, to watch himself in the mirror. 

He had a few days stubble, they kept him shaved, but didn’t care about it before sending him on a mission, and somehow that firsts signs of beard seemed wrong on his face. His hair was long, almost touching his shoulder, not that he was used to look at himself in a mirror, but somehow they seemed wrong too, like they should have been shorter, more cared for. He closed his eyes and the image flashing behind his lids was so similar to the one in the mirror, but somehow deeply different. His eyes weren’t empty or anguished. His lips seemed like ready to smile. So much life on that face. So many things he couldn’t understand. 

“I’m the Winter Soldier. I am a super soldier and I belong to HYDRA. I have no feelings, I’m a killing machine and anything different than protocols or useful data must be wiped from my memories,” he told aloud, fixing his eyes in the ones of his own reflex.

”I am Bucky, you are Bucky. Steve’s best friend 'till the end of the line.”

“I am the Soldier, I am a HYDRA’s asset!” he repeated, louder

”You aren’t. You are a prisoner. You’re Bucky.”

“I am the Winter Soldier. I don’t feel, I can’t feel. I’m not feeling you. I didn’t exist before, I am not human, I exist to fulfil my missions. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know Captain America,” but this time the voice was weak, the whisper of someone who’s loosing. The Soldier wasn’t used to losing.

”You are James Buchanan Barnes. You are Bucky. You existed, Steve was all your life. Our life. My life. HYDRA no longer commands you, HYDRA turned you into a monster.”

“HYDRA is…” he fell again on his knees, he pressed his forehead against the cold porcelain, “I am HYDRA’s assassin, their weapon, I have so much blood on my hands. I am not Bucky. Bucky is dead,” a whisper only he could hear. And the voice in his head.  
”I am Bucky Barnes. I am alive. Steve rescued me once more”

The Soldier didn’t care he was crying, didn’t care he could hear his arm crack, the bones breaking even more while he held the sink with all he had, feeling it crumble under his metallic hand. 

“I am the Winter Soldier,” he sobbed once more, pathetically to even his own ears, “Steve saved me. I am Bucky Barnes,” he whispered in the end and he felt something a lot deeper and painful than bones crack inside him, breaking and shattering like the splinters of the sink around him. “I am Bucky,” he repeated, more forcefully and more desperate.

Shards of memories started to fluctuate in front of his eyes. 

A younger him. A younger Steve, a frail one. He could remember his mother’s face. And Steve’s laughter. He could remember his own laughter. Flashes of lived moments, confused seconds from his past life dancing in his broken mind. Happiness, belonging, love. He could see himself smiling even during the War, hugging Steve… blood. So much blood. Such excruciating pain that just the memories alighted his nerves again. A hundredth of faces smeared with blood, the stench of fear. Throats crushed under his hands. Sadistic laughter. Pain. His blood, their blood. Howard. Dead people, dead kids. Explosions. The red star in stark contrast with the shiny metal of his arm…

He vomited on the floor and kept retching until his chest hurt even more, until he could feel his throat so swollen he could barely breathe. 

“I am Bucky Barnes, Steve’s friend, and I’ve been turned into a monster,” he whispered, voice barely human, eyes fixed on the blood staining his hands. His own blood from the ceramic splinters around him, but so similar to the one he had spilled for years. 

**

Food was a good thing. The Soldier, no, Bucky, was sure of that. He had needed that and the safe house had shown itself furnished with a complete array of canned and frozen food. 

Except he didn’t know what to eat. 

He had been on cryo for so long, or bounded to something, somewhere, that most of his nutrients had always come from an IV, and during missions, there were protein shakes or bars, sometimes even shots to boost his energies. But food…real food…that was something he had forgotten about around the time he had his identity, his life, taken from him. 

He reached for a can, reading the label. Tuna. 

Tuna was a fish, it didn’t have a lot of fats and…no, his mind stopped him. He was going to eat something, not to calculate calories or what was better to get up and fight. He no longer was the Winter Soldier, he was Bucky and he needed to eat to fill his stomach, not for a tactical reason. Except he still had no idea who Bucky really was, had been. Even less what he liked. 

He opened the can and took a piece with his fingers. 

No, definitely Bucky didn’t like tuna. He kept eating it anyway, reminding himself that food wasn’t something always available. 

”It is. You are in the real world now, not at war, not on a mission. You only have to get out and buy it,” the voice in his head replied. No, not a voice, HIS voice. His brain. His thoughts. 

He dropped the can on the table, his stomach reacting badly at the unknown food, or maybe just at the few last hours. Last day, maybe. He was no sure for how long he had been in that apartment, tortured by flashbacks of what he had been and what he now was. The strange thing, though, was that most memories came back with no emotion attached. He had wondered if that was some kind of permanent damage to his brain. Or one of the experiment and modifications HYDRA did on him. But Bucky had been there to supply him with the simple answer that no, it was just plain shock. He was in shock, his mind slowly breaking to show what was deeper inside and actually, his body wasn’t so much better at the moment. The Soldier hadn’t even had in him the energy to fight that thought. After all, he had known it was true. He didn’t know how feelings worked, but he knew a lot about shock, about what a body and a mind could take. He knew he had taken a few blows too much in the last 24 hours. 

With a nervous gesture, he pushed the cans off the table, on the floor. The Soldier flinched at such a thing, but Bucky laughed. He reached for the laptop instead, standard issue in any safe house. 

HYDRA secrets were plastered everywhere on the internet, apparently SHIELD’s stuff too, but he wasn’t interested in that, he knew what he needed about HYDRA, he would have time later to find out more and SHIELD was down, it was no longer a threat. No, what he needed right at that moment was to find out who the damn James Buchanan Barnes had been. 

It didn’t take him long to find more or less anything about the guy’s life. His life. The problem was that every information was as cold and distant as the vague memories getting back to him. He now knew about his military career, his missions. He knew part of his biography, Steve a constant in everything, and he knew how and when he had died, or hadn’t died, semantic, but he still didn’t know who he was, who he had been. 

He didn’t even think while he put some clothes on, plain civilian clothes, anonymous ones, and a baseball cap, he realized he was walking just when he automatically stopped in front of the huge banners advertising the Captain America exhibit. Bucky chuckled, leave it to Steve to manage to have an exhibit about himself. The Soldier hesitated, confused by the sound that just left his lips and the new feeling. Something similar to amusement. He had to remember that, he sort of liked it. 

What he didn’t like was to be inside those rooms. It was his face plastered everywhere near Steve. His voice speaking along Steve’s. Everything screamed Bucky almost as much it screamed Captain America. But he could remember just shards of it. He couldn’t really remember the faces of the men who, apparently, had fought with him, under him, for him. It was like reading a history book, one that gave him no new information. He needed data. He needed to know more, to know the details. It was a mission, it was HIS mission!

The man stopped almost hypnotized in front of some video interview to Captain America.

Steve was laughing, but apparently, Steve used to always laugh, at least at the time – there had been no traces of laughter on his face the few times he had met him, only anguish – but the mirth wasn’t what had caught his attention. The words weren’t either, some stupid tirade about fighting for his country – this time the Soldier didn’t even flinch at his own mind when it discarded the honor of dying for a cause - What had caught his attention had been the way he had grabbed Bucky’s arm – his arm, his arm! – while he had been casually passing by and had engulfed him in a bear hug. 

The Bucky on the screen laughed, the one standing in front of it froze. He rewatched the video for the third time. He couldn’t remember it, the moment, the hug, but he could suddenly remember Steve’s scent. It was like he was hugging him at that precise moment. He couldn’t describe it, and he was sure it had slightly changed too after the serum that had turned the skinny and sickly boy into the image boy of America, but he just knew he remembered that scent, the feeling of hiding his face in Steve’s neck, or hair, and breathing in it.

Bucky almost laughed. He couldn’t retrieve memories of himself, real memories, not just vague flashes, but he could remember Steve’s odour. He had been under the HYDRA spell for decades and it had taken Steve minutes to free him. He was also sure he perfectly remembered Steve’s laughter. Not the fake one in front of the camera that embarrassed him, no, the private one, the one Steve so often had reserved only for him. 

It felt like all his world had turned around Steve, or at least like everything important did. He couldn’t even remember his mother voice but…

_”'till the end of the line”_

That sentence again, once more repeated in his mind. But it was a different voice this time. It was Steve’s, sure, but not the Steve he had met the day before. It was a different Steve, a lighter one. It was his voice before he had lost everything. Bucky had no idea why he knew that, but he did.

He felt the need to retch again, instead, he just stood still in front of another panel talking about him, about how great a service he had given to his Nation and what an amazing human being and soldier he had been. He stared at it with unseeing eyes. It was probably shock again, because he could feel nothing looking at himself, at his own face, even if he was learning nothing that he hadn’t already read on the internet he was sure there should have been something, but, once more, he could feel watching at Steve. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Sure enough, he wasn’t going to think it was the same belonging feel that had hit him under the shower. 

He spent some more time looking at the uniforms – Steve’s still missing – of the Howling Commandos, at his own clothes. He could vaguely recall those men, just flashes and pieces, triggered by the images, but he still couldn’t recall himself in those clothes, or with them or…

The wave of nausea hit hard, he took a few steps and casually leaned against the wall to fight it. He had a lot of recollections but of himself, he appeared in his shattered memories, but only if it was related to someone else. That was what HYDRA had really done. He had deleted himself from his own brain. They had wiped his mind clean over and over until he had been no one to himself. Until he had been no more. Maybe they had known all the time that Bucky had still been there somewhere, probably that was the reason of Pierce’s bad reaction in the vault, but they had also known that they had taken everything from him. He didn’t even remember what he liked to eat! 

He started to laugh, but immediately covered his mouth with his metal hand, the glove leather cold against his overheated lips. The last thing he needed was to get undesired attention, his face was plastered on every newspaper, on the news feeds…he was one of the most wanted men in the United States, probably preferably dead, he couldn’t afford for someone to notice him. Still, he could barely keep his cackle contained. Seven decades of work, of wiping, of tortures and apparently no one had thought that there was something a lot more important to Bucky than himself, something that went well beyond what he liked or what he felt or who the damn he was: Steve. 

Everyone had apparently ignored the little detail that in his mind, Steve was worth a lot more than himself. He had always had, even when he had been a sick kid trying to get punched at any given occasion. And it had nothing to do with being a hero, with being better than him, with…

No, no, no, no, Bucky wasn’t going there and more important he wasn’t going there in the middle of a public place! Maybe he really was stupid, but the Soldier wasn’t, he wasn’t going to allow him such incapacitating thoughts while in a potentially hostile environment. 

Once more he ran. He crossed back alleys, jumped on fences and roofs, climbed gates and speeded down abandoned tube’s stairs. No one saw him but no one had to, that was the idea. He could have as much as traveled on a bus with the cap lowered on his face, but it would have been a useless risk, plus he needed to run, he needed to focus on the physical pain, oh, his arm felt deliciously agonizing and his ribs like hot pokes. It was so much sweeter than being trapped and tortured inside his own head, tormented by unknown feelings, by his foreign reflection in the mirror. The pain was his return ticket into the Winter Soldier mind. He’d have killed for a protocol to follow at that moment, for a mission. He chuckled once more – he definitely had to eradicate that thing from Bucky – he was sure he’d have killed. He was designed to do that, only that. With a pinch of psychopathy, just to make sure he enjoyed it, just to make a drug out of it. Apparently, HYDRA had cared for his well being. 

He strode right under the shower, clothes and all, he turned on the water and forced it into his face. He felt like he was drowning, he felt his lungs constrict and his body fight to get away, but no, he used his years as the Soldier to ignore his own will, he kept the water going, filling his mouth, his nose, against his survival instinct, the one so often tortured out of him. 

The problem was, the moment he moved the water away, the feeling didn’t leave, instead. 

He still felt like he was drowning, he still felt his lungs burning and he still felt like he was fighting against himself. Against his primordial instincts. But once again there was no pity for him from his brain, it was suddenly there supplying him with some fresh memories of a tiny Steve fighting against bullies three times bigger than him, ignoring his survival instinct – even if Bucky was starting to believe Steve really hadn’t one – because it was the right thing to do. 

“Thank you brain. More Steve!” he said out loud to the empty room, Bucky almost chuckled again, but he pointed the water back at his face before he could do it. It didn’t matter that time either, so he just went out of that stupid shower, shed the damp clothes along the way, without even noticing the stark contrast with how the Soldier treated his stuff, the military precision, and sat naked and wet in front of the computer. 

This time he started to click and open all the leaked SHIELD and HYDRA files, interested in them, but he also started to scan them for whatever information about Steve or Captain America, suddenly no longer curious about what the two organization had about him. 

**

Two days, actually three if he counted the one before the mission. 74 hours total. 

The Soldier knew he had to sleep, he knew he was so tired he wasn’t even getting flashes anymore, just a low throbbing in his head. Sure, he had been without sleep for longer in the past, during difficult missions, but that had been with whatever HYDRA kept pumping in his body every few hours. That day, instead…well, he was just exhausted. Such a human feeling, but at least one he could totally understand and embrace.

He looked at the king sized bed. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept in a bed if he ever had at all. Yes, his head supplies that there had been a time when a bed was normal, but at the same time even Bucky agreed that had been so long he couldn’t remember how it was. War, the front, wasn’t the place for beds, the Soldier had slept in the cryo cell, had slept on floors and a few times on cots. Chairs. Airplanes. Stretchers – even if that had always been more about being passed out. But beds…no, the Soldier was pretty sure he had never tried one. 

He approached it as it was something dangerous, as he could be poisoned by touching it. He tried the mattress with his hand. Soft, so soft. 

Too soft.

Bucky agreed. 

A quick flash of a faraway past, a young Bucky. The soldier brought the heels of his hands against his temples, in pain. Bucky had been sitting on a bed, Steve near him. They were laughing. They had been happy about something… The Soldier forced himself to remember, without even realizing. He wanted to know, he needed to know what they’ve been happy about! But he couldn’t. He could only focus on the mattress. It had been soft but not so much. And it had been bulky. It hadn’t seemed to matter to Steve while he laid over it still laughing. 

“Sleep. My priority is now to sleep,” he murmured. He grabbed the duvet, scanned the room. There was some space between the bedroom and the bathroom door from where he could see the front door and the window both, from where he had a clear shot to whoever tried to enter. He splayed the sheet on the floor, hid a few guns under it and took off his clothes. 

Before he could lay down he went back to the bed, he tried the pillows with his hand and took the softest. 

Without even notice the Soldier smiled, satisfied, and a second later brought a finger to his lips, tracing and feeling them. So that was what a real smile felt like. It hasn’t been something in his head, a voice different from his own. It was him who was smiling. The Soldier, but for a moment he felt like Bucky. Like he really was Bucky Barnes. 

**

By the fifth day he had learned he loved plums but hated peaches, at least the canned and too sweet ones, that he could live out of pizza, even cold, but he really couldn’t because all his data reminded him it wasn’t appropriate for his body, but by the fourth he had already ignored that rule at least three meals in a row. Coffee was alright only with a lot of sugar in it, his memory had reminded him that Steve had used to take it black without sugar but he had focused more on the wonder of the idea that the skinny kid from his memories and the actual Steve were the same person. 

By the sixth day, he upgraded to sleep on the couch, admitting it was almost bulkier and uncomfortable than the mattress of his memories. Still, he liked it, because he had remembered more than a few moments on that bed with Steve, he had remembered his scent in the summer, when his skin had smelled like the sun. He had gotten back the hugs, the sleeping together even if that made no sense, why should have shared a bed with his friend? But in the end he didn’t care, he liked the bulky couch because it felt like being back there. Like being back to be Bucky, for real.

**

_Hands are grabbing him, holding him. The hard weapons are pressed against him, against his armor, against his naked neck, his temple, but it isn’t enough, he kept struggling, screaming. He doesn’t even know why, he tries to think, but he just can’t.  
He punches one of the guards holding him but someone is suddenly there to drive a knife in his bicep, the blade turns inside his flesh, his muscle, tearing it apart. He screams, a sound that has nothing of human, the pain almost blinding but not stronger than the rage, the hate, the fear. _

_He wants to get away, he wants to kill._

_The smell of blood is overwhelming, he is covered in it, too much to be his, he gags but uses the reflex to hit another guard with his head. He can hear the man’s nose crack. More blood. A hit on his cheekbone with the butt of a pistol, his head turns against his will, pain running straight to his brain, but he ignores it and he bites one of the hands restraining his metal arm. He spits blood and skin, someone kicks at his leg, hard, someone else, on the other side, stabs him again, in the tight.  
He falls on his knees, all the people are closing around him, he can’t breathe._

_He tries to think why all that is happening, what’s telling him to do all that. It’s not a mission, these people wear the HYDRA insignia, but he has to fight them. It’s like a thought he can’t catch, like a lingering dream after you wake up, a word on the tip of your tongue._

_Someone grabs him by his hair, pulls his head backwards painfully and immediately a gun is in his mouth, pushed down his throat. He panics, but doesn’t gag, a jolt of fear raises his hair but at the same time he welcomes the feel, the idea he is about to die.  
He prays they’re going to pull the trigger. Do it. Do it, please. He begs in his mind. But they don’t. They hit him in the face again instead, over and over, someone with his fists, someone with the butt of the gun or the rifle. _

_The pistol in his mouth clashes against his teeth at every blow._

_The pain is excruciating, he feels the hunt knife sinking and tearing, the men laugh, he can hear crude comments about the arm in his mouth and he tries to swallow around it, but he only feels more blood running down his throat._

_So much anger, so much hate. Just one thought repeating in his mind, a scream, loud enough to override the pain: kill. Kill them, kill everyone! Destroy yourself!_

_He’s lost, lost in his head, in places he doesn’t know but that he knows he should. He sees dead people, but he also sees some who are alive. Scenes of such horror he can’t describe and flashes of sincere smiles and blue eyes._

_He doesn’t know what just happened, he was apparently lost in his own head because now he’s lying on the floor, a foot on his neck to press his face against the concrete. Someone had divested him of his armor, of most of his clothes. A man in front of him is barking orders at the guards, they stop the laughter and catcalls, but he can’t make out the words, all he can hear is the blood rushing in his ears, the remains of those flashes._

_He gets manhandled on his feet, dragged around, he almost can’t feel one of his legs, the pants around his knees stop him from moving, but he starts to struggle again, even if he’s too weak to really fight back. The men don’t even hit him this time._

_Kill them, kill them all._

_He’s unable to think again, too many people are screaming, his body is too, for the pain. Someone cuts off the remains of his clothes and now they’re fastening him to something. He tries to fight, driven by sheer panic, he pulls against the leather bonds, he screams, but no one seems to care about it, no one even flinches. The man is still yelling and commanding, something about an error, something about time._

_He hears a word, “wipe” and his blood seems to ice in his vein, but he has no idea. He knows about nothing, his brain is frozen. He can’t._

_A needle gets his mind back, it’s something familiar, but someone closes a glass door in his face, he’s tied up in a tiny cubicle and he can’t breathe, he can’t think, he can’t even scream. He wants out. He wants to die, he’s more than alright with that idea. Instead, he feels a terrible cold, something that has nothing to do with death._

_He’s so cold. He’s so scared._

**

He woke up screaming, rolling down of the couch, gun in his hand, but he already knew the danger was coming from inside his head. He didn’t stop screaming, furious and shaking, totally uncaring that such a noise could attract the wrong kind of attention. He threw the gun against the wall with a yell, then, for once, did something against every security protocol: he curled on the floor, weeping. 

Those dreams were the reason he hated sleeping. The reason he had started sleeping on the couch that gave him memories of Steve, in the hope he dreamed of him instead of terrible horrors he, luckily, couldn’t almost remember when he was awake. The not remembering part didn’t make it better, it felt like someone had tried to scrub his memory clean, like there was so much more than just Bucky and his past life that he should remember, but at the same time it made him terrified of the kind of things that could be hidden in his brain. He was a killing machine, not at the moment, maybe, but he had been for the last decades, he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to jostle images of what he had done. Not that he had any control over what his mind decided to do. 

It took Bucky long minutes to calm down, even more, to stop shivering and sweating at the same time. Slowly he sat up, back against the couch. There were no marks on his body. No, there were a few, but one of those he could remember from a stupid fall when he had been a kid, so probably the scars had been already there…before. No marks from the knives in his dream, instead, or the hits that had broken the skin. Whatever had been done to him in those years had left no scars. It was like it had never happened, except he now knew it had. He knew a lot of things had happened that he didn’t remember and too many that were instead starting to resurface. 

It took him three tries to get on his feet and reach for the sink, and while he gulps down a glass of water to wash away the bitter taste in his mouth, he recalled doing something similar more than once. He had been a lot younger, it had been a different sink and it had been blood instead than bile, but more important he had been smiling even while spitting blood from a cut lip, because Steve had been behind him, even more, bloody and bruised, but excitedly babbling about how they had taught their lesson to some bully or the other. 

Smiling, Bucky rinsed the glass.

It was funny how he could smile while still being so shaken. That thought was enough for the gloom to rain back on him. His hands were still trembling badly, he could still smell the blood from his dream, but he couldn’t start to make sense of it. The HYDRA files containing details about him still were on his desktop, a neat virtual folder he hadn’t had the strength to click. 

Bucky had just resurfaced, the Soldier had just found out he was more than a killing machine, than a weapon, than a non-human asset, he wasn’t ready to read about his missions, about what he had done. He wasn’t ready to read black on white, told in cold reports, what they had done to him. His nightmares had only been fragments, flashes of a broken mind, horrific and scary, yes, but not so detailed, how was he supposed to plainly read what had been done to his body and his mind over and over, the inventive ways HYDRA had found to break them. 

He didn’t even think when he turned the laptop on and started to quickly type commands. Being a safe house the IP was already set to go around the globe a few times before one could even search for the popcorn recipe. Plus it wasn’t even hacking, Steve’s email had been everywhere, a little inconvenience while leaking all that stuff, but he was sure he remembered enough about Steve that he probably hadn’t changed it yet, and from what who recalled of him… really? His mother’s name and Bucky’s birthday as a password? Didn’t they have someone working security at SHIELD just to tell Steve he’s an idiot? Or maybe he should one day to have a few words with that Tony Stark and ask him to explain to Steve about internet security and privacy. 

Except a few received in the past hours all the emails had been read and neatly moved into different folders. Apparently Steve didn’t empty his spam folder and, apparently, he didn’t use his draft folder. Probably the man checked the same mail ten times before sending it, changing a word here and there, but he didn’t have the actual patience to let something sit in the drafts folder, unsent. 

Without hesitation, Bucky clicked on the “new mail” tab. 

_Hey Steve, I’m Buck. Or well, I think I am, most of the time at least. I shouldn’t be writing or contacting you in any way, I know, and I’m not assuming you want to hear from me ever again, why should you. Why should anyone want to hear from the Winter Soldier, apparently not even who remains of HYDRA want. Not that I wouldn’t fight them off if…_

Bucky watched the pulsing cursor. Could he be more pathetic if he tried? He quickly deleted the text and started again.

_Steve, I’m Bucky. It isn’t a trap, you were right, now I know Buck existed, I know it was me even if I still only have sparse memories about me. What I remember a lot better, instead, it’s you, and_

He stopped typing once more. Seriously, he should close that laptop and forget about that stupid idea. How could he think it was alright to write to Steve? To tell him what, that he felt like the whole world was crumbling around him and that he was terrified and desperate? That all he wanted was to be held by him one more time? 

One more time, one more try, then he was to shut down the computer, close it in another room and go out, where he wasn’t tempted to fall from a super soldier to a pathetic mock of a human being. 

_Steve, I’m_

He paused. Was it alright to use the nickname his friend had given him or was it too close and personal? He didn’t know, he couldn’t really decide, so…

_Steve, I’m Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, I remember, and I know you used to call me Bucky, or Buck. That’s not a trap, I just wanted to let you know that I have gotten part of my memories back, therefore, the Winter Soldier is at the moment subdued, so in the close future I am not a threat to you or your friends. This message won’t disclose my location. Know that I’ll make sure in every possible way that the HYDRA weapon won’t take control again and I’ll fight to terminate it in case HYDRA will try a recovery._

Was it too cold? But he had no reason to be more affectionate, why should Steve want to read that? Bucky was sure he wasn’t hiding in a corner scared that the big, bad Winter Soldier was going to grab him in the night. It hadn’t been that the reason he had started writing to Steve. Alright, to be honest, he had no idea why he had started that email, he just knew he wanted to. He NEEDED to talk to Steve somehow. The idea of Steve was the only thing keeping him marginally sane – if an assassin talking to a Brooklyn guy inside his own head could be considered even marginally sane.

To be honest, though, Steve had been up to die, to be killed punch after punch, just to have him remembering he was Bucky…

_'till the end of the line._

…probably in his mind Steve still cared a lot about his Bucky. He was disgusted by the being he now was, but he couldn’t let go of the memory of him. It was wrong, so wrong to write to him, to remind him of someone no longer existed, to feign of being something Bucky no longer was, but all Bucky wanted was to be an egoist for one minute and to write to his friend. Not that he deserved any kind of comfort or that he had any right to ask something from Steve, even if it was a second of his time, a memory. But for once he could maybe write that off on the list of terrible and wrong things the Soldier had done, give him the fault. Just this once. One last time. 

He needed Steve, he needed him so bad. Probably part of his punishment was to know he could never have him by his side again, or hear his laughter or smell his scent. It sounded so terrible it felt almost appropriate as part of the punishment for the crimes he had committed. More appropriate than the sweet release of death.

_Didn’t want to go more personal, it’s not important, but since it seemed so important to you on the helycarrier, even if I can’t understand why, know that I only have some minor damage and I am currently safe. Also, know that I can remember you and you actually are a prominent part of what my brain could retrieve. I hope your own brain can now be at peace, knowing that._

Should he sign it somehow? Yeah, send him kisses and love, the sarcastic part of his brain offered, and Bucky wasn’t sure where that came from, but he couldn’t disagree. 

He saved the draft and marked it as unread, then he closed the laptop before he could change his mind. 

It was done. Now he only had to wait. Sure, writing Steve this way was probably the safest, no one could detect the message, but it also implied that Steve had to actually sign in his email account. Maybe he wasn’t going to. Probably he downloaded his emails on some clients and it would take years for him to notice a draft inside his account. Probably, by then, he’d have already terminated the Winter Soldier, for the safety of the Earth. 

Bucky wasn’t sure about that last part. After the extent Steve had gone to not to kill him, to have him remember, would he really kill him? He felt like an idiot. Sure he could, for a superior cause. And maybe Steve wouldn’t have killed Bucky in the past, but sure as hell he’d have no problem now, once he was going to realize his Bucky was gone and only a killing monster with his face was still around.


	3. 3.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing Steve keeps making me nervous, I have nothing in common with him so it's difficult to force my brain into thinking like him. Still, if you think the email is because of that..nope. The mail is exactly what I would expect from a Steve in the middle of an emotional breakdown. It's Bucky we're talking about, so Steve is 99% instinct (and unicorns and flying hearts) and maybe 1% reason, so I didn't expect a colder mail, I could see him freak out like a mother hen ;) (after all is what Bucky had done with him for the first part of their life, every time Steve as much as sneezed...)

Steve kept pacing the room, forcing himself not to break some random piece of furniture. Well, at least not more than the two chairs and the tv screen he already had.

His body fucking hurt – he almost smiled pathetically at himself. Language, Steve – a low thrum as if a few holes and broken bones were something he cared about. What had it been, five, six days since he’d been hit and shot and whatever? Weren’t his internal organs and his muscles, his damn bones, supposed to be healed by now? Was that damn serum so useless? And why was he noticing that anyway? It wasn’t like he gave a damn about his body. Well, at least he just found out what could revert him to speak like some drunk in the streets. 

Streets. Was there where Bucky was? Where could he have been gone after the crash, after saving him? Did he manage to run, to hide, did he have a place to stay? HYDRA was basically gone, but what if someone got his hands on him?

Steve wonders if by then Bucky was still able to remember him again at all. 

On basically every surface of his apartment paper sheets were scattered. He still wasn’t used to concentrating on important things reading them on a computer screen. 

Sam, Natasha, even Fury, had fought not to let him read the leaked files about the Winter Soldier, he had had to physically threaten them – well, not Natasha, he wasn’t sure even Captain America could survive her – to have access to them, to have them printed and archived in different manila folders, on everyone a date and a place were neatly written.

But now he was no longer sure it had been a good idea to go against his friends' opinion, because he felt like throwing up, again, like smashing things, like repeatedly banging his head against the wall, to hell with his concussion. Anything, anything to forget what he had read. Anything to stop thinking that those had been real things, experiments, done on Bucky. 

He had only read 2 of 103 files. 

His hands kept shaking when he took a bottle of water from the fridge and gulped down half of it. Then he grabbed a beer. He didn’t like it very much, nor the alcohol had any effect on him, but it had become a tradition to have a beer with the rest of the squad after a mission, and now he really needed something familiar. Usual. Something to give his mind one minute of rest. He knew there was nothing short of a miracle that could do that, but it was worth a try. A useless one, apparently.

How could all that has happened? How was possible that no one at SHIELD had known the legendary ghost, the Soldier people whispered about in secret, was Bucky? And why had no one told him? Had Fury, or maybe Natasha, hid it from him intentionally? Rationally he knew it wasn’t true, Natasha had even doubted that assassin was more than a legend, but there was nothing rational in the clench he felt around his throat.

Steve sat down on the armchair. He couldn’t breathe. 

He could have saved Bucky the day he had fallen from the train before HYDRA could put his hands on him for real. If only he could have imagined what Zola had done to Bucky that first time...

He could have saved Bucky just days later, could have brought him home a little shocked and with a shiny arm but alive.

He could have saved Bucky years before, in the modern era, the first thing the moment they got him out of the ice. No, he was lying to himself, he wouldn’t have ever crashed on purpose if he had known. Not because he wouldn’t have lost everything, it had never been about being suicidal, it had been about saving the world, but if only he had known Bucky had been alive and in the grip of HYDRA…well, he was a hero but he was human, he knew he’d have been up to let the world be destroyed just to go and search for his best friend. 

It would have been better for them both to be dead for good rather than having left Bucky to suffer what Steve had read on the files. In 2 files of 103. 

They had made a chart of Bucky’s pain while cutting through different muscles, based on the screams and brainwaves. They had sliced him open just to see which pain they had to taught him to endure.   
With a scream Steve threw the bottle against the wall, staring as the amber liquid slowly dripped down to form a puddle on the floor.

Was Bucky in pain at the moment? 

Oh God, if he was back in the hands of HYDRA he was probably being punished for failing the mission, they had probably given him the fault of the failed program. 

In a place where you got sliced open for fun, what was considered punishment? 

And why was he there instead, in his living room, doing absolutely nothing to find and save him? 

_”Tell me you have something_ he texted Natasha. 

She was in a mess, on the verge of being incriminated because of what the whole world now knew about her past, but she apparently hadn’t given up on Steve, she was still trying to help him. Steve had really no idea why. 

_Just heard from Fury and Sam. No trace of HYDRA cells. Chances are he never got taken back. Can’t talk now, sorry_

Chances. 

Some psycho had tested how much electricity could go through the metal arm before really affecting the human parts of Bucky’s body and they were talking about chances? He needed to know for sure, he needed to intervene, to save Bucky, not to think about chances!

He needed to have Bucky back, to hold him and know he was going to be safe.

He needed his Bucky. 

It had been almost easy to keep going in the middle of the emergency, he hadn’t had time to breath, sure enough, he hadn’t time to linger on the thought that Bucky was still alive. He had actually forced himself not to think about that, he had been the only one able to stop the tragedy about to happen, he had chosen decades before to be Captain America, to save people, so it had been natural to postpone his own break down. And he had to admit, it had only been Bucky’s body in that street, not his friend, not enough to make him forget about the mission. 

On the helicarrier though, he had seen the moment Bucky had resurfaced and the mission was over, complete with a positive result, but he couldn’t remember caring about it.

Great, he had saved the world once more, how was that supposed to be more important than the fact that Bucky was alive and now, hopefully, out there all alone, hurt, confused? 

He shouldn’t have got him back, he should have left the Winter Soldier to control that body because he wasn’t sure any human mind could deal with certain memories. Probably not his noble Bucky.

With a shudder and a new wave of nausea, Steve wondered if Bucky was still alive or if he had caused so much damage that he had killed himself. Deep down he thought that could be a possibility if Bucky had remembered all the terrible things HYDRA had him do. 

Those files Steve had read from top to bottom. He hadn’t even been able to be angry for a second when he had found out it had been the Winter Soldier who killed Stark. The Winter Soldier wasn’t Bucky, just a killer, a monster who had coldly killed one of his friends and his wife. He couldn’t find a single fiber in his body that somehow blamed Bucky. But he knew he was probably the only one. Everyone else out there wanted his head. 

The problem was that Steve wasn’t even sure who “everyone” was. SHIELD was gone, sure, but he had no doubt someone was already working to put together something very similar to it. More than a few HYDRA bases were still scattered around the world and sure, they’d lost their head, but that “Cut off a head, two more will take its place” stuff was probably true and Steve had no doubt, someone, somewhere, was already coming up with a new cunning plan to try and conquer Earth. But now that the files had leaked he was sure there were more than just those two. They’ve touched so many lives and seen so many horrors that he couldn’t doubt there were monsters everywhere just waiting to occupy the slots left empty. And the Winter Soldier surely was an asset anyone would have wanted. 

He wanted him.

By that point, Steve was sure he could even put up with having a killing machine around his house if it meant knowing Bucky was okay, if it meant to know that he was still trapped behind cold and unblinking eyes but alive somewhere in there. 

Problem was, even if he couldn’t help himself, he knew he wasn’t going to get Bucky by freaking out. He needed intelligence, information, leads. It’s been 70 years, he had to admit not to have any idea how Bucky’s head worked now, how and where he could hide even being back to himself. 

He needed to raid every single HYDRA base, get whatever intel he could, beat to a pulp a few bastards here and there and hope for the better. But to do that he had to focus, to ignore the blind fear and desperation and study the files. The real ones, not the ones about the Winter Soldier. He had only been a weapon, he had no relevance in the organization. 

He forced himself into a deep breath, then another. He opened and relaxed his hands, tried to work a few kinks off his neck. 

He was Steve Roger and he was on the most important mission of his life: save Bucky Barnes. 

Cautious not to lose control again he took out his phone once more. That morning Sam had texted him about some files, he had said he was going to send him an email, it was a place as good as any other to start from. 

Except there were no notifications. 

Sighing not to let that anger he had never felt before win, he opened the app. His phone froze, the app crashed. 

Another deep breath, Steve had to focus to keep his language in check. He definitely had to talk to Tony about a customized phone. He didn’t need a lot, just for the damn thing to actually work. 

It took him a second to find the energy to get up and reach for his desk, but he was ready to swear it wasn’t because of his wounds still making him weak or because he was supposed to be in bed like the useless doctors said. He was exactly where he was needed and if he was so tired was because of his head, his emotions, nothing to do with something physical. 

He quickly logged in, admitting to himself he needed to change his password before Nat or Tony found it out or he wasn’t going to hear the end of it. 

The files were there, in his inbox. Four attachments and a quick note to read them and try to verify the intel through Nat.

Steve knew he was lucky he had found Sam. He was a great man, a good soldier and an amazing friend. He had no reason to be helping him, instead here he was, after risking his life more than a few times, searching for clues about someone who could kill him with a single finger. 

The attachments were saved on the desktop, then sent straight to the printer. 

There it was. A first step to have his Bucky back. It was probably a false lead, Steve had no hope it was going to be so easy to find him, but a first step nonetheless. Resigned he signed out of his client and went to the printer on the other side of the little office, starting to sort and staple the various file. However, there was something strange. Something in his head that hadn’t been there before, like something was out of place, like that “I’ve forgotten something” feeling that you get before leaving. 

Steve stopped, paper sheets in his hands. 

There was nothing different than five minutes before, he had only checked his…there it was! He still couldn’t wrap his mind around it, but he was then sure he had caught something with the corner of his eye while checking Sam’s message. Something so irrelevant he didn’t look at it, but apparently it was odd enough for his brain to register it. 

It took Steve a second to log in again, even less to notice what was different than usual in the page. There was an unread and saved draft. He had never saved a draft. He frowned, confused. It could have been a virus, some spy program, one of those fancy things Tony and Natasha could ramble about for hours, but the internet was overloaded with data about the two most secret organization ever, why should someone want to enter his computer? He had around ten scanned newspaper pages from the ‘40s, just because there were Bucky or the Howling Commandos in the photos, too many emails with bad or crude jokes from Tony, which were obviously no good to find the man’s IP. And maybe, even if he wasn’t going to admit it, a well-hidden folder with some porn. Not that he was interested in that kind of things, he had downloaded that just to see how sex had changed. He blushed and shacked his head at how pathetic he was, but his eyes stayed glued to the bold number. 

The right thing was to delete that mail or whatever it was. 

Steve started to bit his thumbnail, then his finger. He had no idea why, but he couldn’t. It was a draft, not a received message. It was probably stupid, but he had to see what it was. He ignored how his hand was shaking while he clicked it.   
After the first few words, he read the message without even being able to breathe, a warm feeling spreading in his chest. 

Bucky was alive. 

Bucky was alive and he had some memories and he had taken the time to write to him. 

It didn’t matter that it was cold and impersonal, or maybe it mattered but just a little bit, in his fantasies the first words from Bucky had been a lot more sappy and romantic, but his fantasies had also ended with the two of them kissing, possibly naked. That wasn’t a fantasy. That was Bucky leaving him a message. Because Bucky was okay and he could actually do things like hacking someone’s mail and create a draft. 

An alarm bell was ringing in his brain, it had Fury’s voice and it was saying that it could as well be a trap, but in the years he had gotten good at ignoring Fury, so he was even better at ignoring him inside his head.

So, first things first. He had no idea how that thing worked, but he guessed he must leave a draft too, and sooner or later Bucky would log in to read it. Steve chuckles. He’s sure his friend laughed at him when he had to guess the password. 

With his usual composure, he clicked on “new message”. He was going to reply as a normal human being and he was definitely going to check it a few times before saving it, because he was Steve and he knew how things were done. Absolutely.

 _Bucky, you’re all right, you are safe! Are you hurt, do you need something? Anything at all? I promise no one will try and hurt you in any way, but if you are in need just let me know, tell me of a dropping point and I’ll do or send anything you may need. Do you have food and somewhere to stay? I can drop you money if you need it. It won’t be a setup, I will come alone, leave it and go without even meeting you, you could check. But I need to know you’re alright and you need to know I can help if you’re in a dire situation_ Steve quickly cleaned the tears from his eyes, _You have no idea how relieved I am to hear from you, I was so scared you were back into HYDRA’s hands. And I can’t even start to tell how incredibly awesome it is that you remember, at least something. I admit I wonder if I somehow am in your memories, but I know that doesn’t matter in the slightest, the important thing is that you remember how incredible you were, you are, and please don’t read or listen to the news. I know you, or at least I did, but I’m now surer than ever that nothing good is going to get out of your brain if you start thinking you are the Winter Soldier. Please, let me know more, don’t disappear. We can keep using this way to communicate, I can give you my number, it isn’t traceable, a gift from Tony, and you can buy a burner or… just don’t disappear. Please._

Steve clicked “save”, then took his hands off the keyboard not to change something. Probably everything. It was a stupid and emotional mail, he was sure it was the kind of mail Bucky didn’t want at the moment, he had been so cold and professional in his. There was a big chance that Bucky didn’t even remember much about him, or that he didn’t care. Maybe he hated Steve for jolting his memory and send him into that mess and he had written that email only out of a sense of duty. 

Well, at least there still was one of the two able to reason with his brain. 

Once more he opened a draft, forcing himself into the right state of mind. 

_Sergeant Barnes, I’m glad you feel like that, but are you completely sure the Winter Soldier doesn’t need containment? Can I consider you perfectly positive that you can control it? I can’t risk lives having an assassin in the streets, and for no reason I want to risk your welfare. Let me know if you think you can manage that alone or if there’s some technology that could help. Sorry for that message, but I had to, hope you understand._

Yeah, great Captain! You sent him a serious and professional message too, you even manage not to beg, very very heroic. Steve blushed at himself, the cursor on the screen so close to the first mail. He should have deleted it, he knew. It was the right thing. Maybe he could add something to the more serious one. But he couldn’t. He had waited more than half a lifetime to talk to Bucky again, he couldn’t send a cold mail like his heart hadn’t started beating again just by reading him. He didn’t care if he was pitiable, if Bucky was going to laugh at him. At that point, Steve cared about nothing else but having any possible contact with Bucky. 

He logged out and shut off the computer before he could change his mind and really delete the message, then leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the desk. 

He had no idea how he was going to take the weight of a reply. If there was going to be one. 

Steve was sure he had just found a new hell.


	4. 4.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As chapter warning I can tell you that at the end there's whats obviously a panic attack. At some point there's some self inflicted waterboarding. Oh, and a dead kid.  
> Yes, I know, I'm a bad person, I think that too! 
> 
> On a good note I'm working on the last chapter, so the fic will be published as scheduled. Just four more chapters and I'll stop bother you all :P

The bottle, forgotten on the table, crackled.

Just a short sound, but enough to send Bucky’s brain back. To the recent past. To the programming in his head. 

What was he doing? Surely HYDRA was about to get there and take him back. Unless someone was to get there first to kill him. Probably Captain America and his friends. He had broken every protocol, he had acted in an unacceptable way and he was putting a HYDRA precious asset at risk. 

He needed to make things straight and, if by then there was no one there to do it, to punish himself and remind himself he was only a weapon. 

He had no idea how he got to that point, what made him so dangerous for himself, but it didn’t matter. He got his black, mission, clothes from the floor and wore them, then put back on his armour. There was a protocol, a rule: the Soldier must always be protected, HYDRA won’t spend resources to cure the asset. If he was going to get hurt because he had been so careless to not take care of himself punishment was going to be harsh. And he knew he’d deserve it. 

The code to open the almost invisible door, the only room he hadn’t checked since he had gotten into the safe house, was easy enough, or maybe it had just been programmed into his head at some point. He didn’t know and, honestly, he didn’t care either. 

The lights buzzed for a second before they lightened the room in that fake, white, glow. Weapons were everywhere on the walls, in the lockers. Together with maps and any piece of technology one could imagine. The Soldier selected an array of knives and guns, concealing them in holsters and on him, then went back to the kitchen, letting the secret door open. 

Food. How could he have bought food? It wasn’t a thing for him, he was a weapon, he didn’t use food and sure enough not something in which the taste was apparently more important than the right calories count. He trusted everything into a big trash bag, then broke the laptop in many pieces, using his metal hand to crush the hard disk into little more than dust. A computer was a too dangerous thing, he wasn’t even sure it was protected how it should have. Anyone, that Iron Man guy mostly, could probably trace him with just a tablet. Civil clothes and everything else that he had bought in the past few days went in the trash too. When he was done he went back to the secret vault, leaving the sack there. 

The soldier took out a few bags, some were IV, others just to drink, and left them on the kitchen table. He could go days without eating, and sure he didn’t deserve food after what he had done, but in case he was going to feel a drastic drop in his functions that was the right thing to pump into his body. Not that useless pizza or raw fish. Nutrients straight in his bloodstream, ready to be used. He was a weapon, those were his bullets. 

A cold shiver ran down his spine when he looked at the windows. Unprotected, a weak point. Without hesitation he broke down the table into pieces, using the wood to secure the kitchen. The bed got used for the bedroom and the bathroom. The house fell in a sinister dark, but the Soldier didn’t really need a lot of light to see and fight. 

When everything was done, finished, according to the protocol, he sat on the floor, back against a wall where he could see two windows and the main door. 

He only had to wait. 

”Waiting for what? Come on, you’re no longer the Winter Soldier, you are… the voice in his head supplied, but he stopped it before it could finish. He didn’t know what that sort of glitch in his brain was, but sure enough, he was going to have it terminated. 

He needed to wait for extraction, sure enough, there still was someone out there interested in him, in the perfect weapon, the ghost assassin. They were going to come and get him, and punish him for the mess he had done of the protocol, and then they were going to give him another mission. Or to send him back to the one he had so pathetically failed.

The voice in his head tried to speak again, but he shove it even deeper in the back of his brain. 

He had a mission. He had failed that mission. 

He went up and laid down in the tub, a rag on his face, and he just turned on the water.

He couldn’t breathe, he felt his lungs spasm, panic rising in his throat and keeping him from thinking straight. His chest got thigh. Tears mixed with the cold water. 

It was more than a minute before he let himself move, pulling the towel away to take deep, uncertain, breaths, water inflaming his respiratory tract. 

He knew he couldn’t consider it punishment, but maybe they were going to be a little more lenient with him if they knew he had already started to pay for his mistakes. Or maybe not. Probably whoever his new handler was going to be would want nothing more than to show exactly how much punishment he could dish out. 

He took a deep, useless, breath, and waterboarded himself again, almost congratulating himself on his control. He knew that to torture yourself like that wasn’t something normal people were able to do. Luckily he wasn’t normal. Or people. He wasn’t even a person, no more. He was HYDRA toy, weapon. 

He repeated the thing over and over until he felt his lungs starting to give up, burn more than he could take while staying operative. He crawled out of the tub, resting on the floor, face pressed against the tiles, clothes and armour wet and heavy. He hadn’t seen any hidden camera around him. He had seen no recent traces of HYDRA. What if they really weren’t going to go back for him? He had failed, he no longer had value as an asset. What if HYDRA had sold him to whatever remained of the SHIELD in order to distract them and have a little more time to disappear? 

His body sang in pain when he got up, nothing that interested the Soldier. He used the cracks between the boards to look out of the windows. Some people looked at the house passing by. Were they agents? Probably not since they kept going, not suspiciously enough.

For the first time, the Soldier realized he really was scared. Punishment, pain, torture, he knew, but what was going to happen to him if he was suddenly useless? And what was SHIELD going to do to him if he was going to be captured, mostly because he had been so stupid and careless in the days before?

”Not careless, human. You are getting yourself back, you’re getting me back. Think of Steve. You could even ask him for help, you know he’s your friend before anything else” the voice in his head tried to convince him again, but once more he didn’t listen to it. He had no idea what he was talking about. He knew no Steve and such thing as help didn’t exist. He had to stay in track, he had to follow the protocols and wait. He could only use his brain to survive but he had to follow his handler instructions. Given the death of his handler, he could only wait for someone to extract him or to kill him. Staying alive was in the protocols. He was not sure what was the protocol if it was going to be his new handler who was going to want to terminate him. 

”There’s no one out there, you won’t be terminated, you’re a human being, you are Bucky Barnes, that’s all in your brain, nothing is happening, it’s over and you know it!” that time the voice yelled, desperate not to be ignored. But it didn’t work. 

The Soldier spent three days looking out of the windows, armed to the teeth. He only drank some of that protein stuff he had found in the secure room and tortured himself in any way that came to his mind and was efficient enough without leaving him unable to fight. The voice in his head kept yelling at him or whispering that Steve name, but to listen to the voice was out of the protocol and any break at the protocol meant danger, torture and death. He wasn’t going to listen to the voice. 

The afternoon of the fourth day he collapsed in the space between the kitchen and the open living room. 

_He’s standing on his own, not tied up, not leaning on something, just standing, even if his legs feel unstable, shaky._

_A fist connects with his face, he almost hears his cheekbone crack, but he doesn’t move, arms crossed behind his back. Another punch, on the same spot, makes his head turn. He spits blood before turning once more to look in front of him._

_Pain is starting to be blinding, he can tell at least a few bones are broken, but he can’t move. He can’t let a single sound slip from his lips if he doesn’t want for it to be a lot worse._

_The next fist connects with his other cheek as if his handler is having some pity, but he knows it’s just because they don’t have more than one day for him to heal and be operative. A few crack his ribs and he bites on his tongue hard enough to spit more blood not to make a sound, legs too close to give in._

_“So, are you stopping again during training not to hurt yourself, thing?” the man asks, the soldier’s jaw cracks when two blows hit him in sequence._

_“No, sir!” he says, voice hoarse. It hurts to talk. It hurts to breathe. Actually, it hurts to live, at the moment._

_He’s been out of cryo for too long, too many weeks without dark and silence in his head, only pain and orders and assorted tortures. He isn’t even really needed at the moment, he is kept around for tests. Tests he’s not sure for how long he could take…except he knows they could have him suffer them forever without dying._

_Another fist hit the same cheekbone and this time he can’t help but groan at the searing pain. The man yells something about protocol, but he doesn’t really hear him, too focused on not falling, on watching straight ahead, but a kick hit the side of his knee, bending it in an unnatural way and he can’t help but fall on the other one and watch the combat boot slowly approach his cheek as if in slow motion…._

Bucky woke up screaming, curled in a ball on the floor. Everything hurt, not because of the bad dream, of the memories, he could feel his body battered and bruised, his chest hurting. He slowly forced himself to sit up and move his soaked hair out of his face. He was still inside the safe house, but it was deeply different than how he remembered it. It was dark and cold and too much similar to something straight out of a HYDRA nightmare. He hid behind his own hands. 

He couldn’t remember what had happened in the past few days, but he was no idiot, he knew a lot about the human mind, probably more than he’d like too, and he knew he had slipped back into the Soldier. The problem wasn’t that, the problem was he had no idea what he had done while, once again, he had no control over his own mind. 

Bucky didn’t marvel when he found neither the computer nor the tv had survived his brief change and he only snorted when he apprehended his clothes and food hadn’t either. Once more he took off the armour, this time actually marvelled by how many weapons he could actually hide on himself, and still uncertain on his legs headed for the door. His stomach was grumbling, but the food wasn’t a priority, to know if he had hurt someone was.

For a second he closed his eyes. Not someone, Steve. That had been his mission, that had been what went terribly wrong, he was sure something in his brain still wanted to kill Captain America. Something he could not control and that, now he knew, fed on fear. And inside the Soldier, there was so much fear and pain to feed a monster for centuries. 

The public library was almost desert when he got in, heading straight for the computers. He didn’t even make sure no one could track him before launching a basic search. If Captain America had been hurt, or if the Soldier had killed in the city, Google was more than enough to find out. He kept his breath for the few seconds the old desktop took to upload the page. Nothing. All the news about himself and Steve were from the helicarrier or the various leaked files. He left his breath go with a sigh.

Without even thinking about it he logged into Steve’s mail. He wasn’t too hopeful to see a reply, he knew it had been a long shot, but he needed so much to hear from him at that moment, more than he had the previous days. Maybe more than he ever had before. 

His hand was shaking when he clicked on the draft. 

Tears started to roll down his face while he read. 

Apparently, Steve was really as good as he thought and remembered. Both those mail were so…Steve. Bucky was sure he was pretty different from the last time they had been together, but at the same time, he could read in his words both the kid who got himself in trouble every day and the one who clung to him under the covers. He lingered on that last thought just for a second, he knew there was more he should remember about that, but it was one of the thousand pieces of his past life that he hadn’t got back yet. Instead, he went back to smile at how appropriate for Captain America that second message was. 

He deleted Steve’s message, almost sorry at having to do so as if something in him had wanted to keep them to read again and again. Except he wasn’t a teenager nor a girl with a crush. 

When he started typing he decided he wasn’t going to hesitate and write the same mail ten times like he had the first time. He was a grown man and a killing machine. A little on the verge of a psychotic break down, sure, but still with a pride. 

_Hi, Steve. I am safe and in one piece, the most bruised is my brain, to be honest, but I’m working on it, both on the good and the bad. I still don’t remember everything, but you I remember very well, or at least I think I do. I admit I still have huge pieces of my memories missing, and some of the ones I’m retrieving would better be forgotten, but I accept it. I’m starting to remember most of the people I killed, at the moment I’m not dwelling too much over it, I feel the guilt but it would make me too weak and I need my focus to be sure I’ll be the one in control and not the Soldier. I already saw it’s almost too easy to let him surface, but don’t worry, I have him contained._

Bucky shook his head while writing that sentence. It was a lie, maybe an obvious one, but if he wasn’t ready to face Steve then he couldn’t have him worry about the Soldier getting out at any moment, it was Bucky’s responsibility to control and subdue him and his memories. He felt even more tired when he started to write again.

_Also I don’t think Hydra could have him back, we know all the protocols, if there has been no approach until now probably anyone in the Winter Soldier project is gone and they’re no more interested in that asset_ a wave of nausea hit him. 

In his mind, he knew it was true, but unconsciously, in his heart… Was he really free? And why wasn’t he totally happy to be? Even worse, why was he so scared of being free in the world?

 _Odd enough I’m trying to acquaint with this modern world. The Soldier had training in all the newest technologies and how to use them, but somehow everything feels so alien actually living here as myself, it’s so different from what I…from our time, maybe you can relate to that. I’d rather keep communicating that way from the time being, I’m alright and I need nothing, don’t worry about me_

“or even think about me, I don’t deserve it” his brain supplies, so cold for a second Bucky thought it was the Soldier resurfacing and shivered when he had to admit, instead, that it was just him thinking that 

_Sorry I couldn’t read your messages for days, I hope the situation will allow me to read more often in the future. If you don’t break some protocol, and I’m not asking you to disclose reserved information, could I know if SHIELD, or what is left of it, is on me? It’s a matter of safety for both parts, I won’t even try to run. B._

He clicked the save button and logged out as fast as he could, deleting the browser history before he could really think about going back and change the mail. Had he been too personal, disclosing too much of what was going on? Or once more he had dampened too much Steve’s happiness? Not that Steve had actually a lot to be happy about, Bucky was barely hanging there and the Soldier was as dangerous as always. But Steve didn’t really know that and Bucky wasn’t ready to tell him. And maybe it had been a bit of a stretch to say that HYDRA was no longer interested in him, but he had to admit a small, very tiny, part of his brain knew it was the truth. The same tiny part that was freaking out. It’s the place in his mind where he kept the Soldier and it was him breaking down at the idea. He was now a monster without a cage, without control, without a mission. He no longer had a reason to exist. The problem was that he and Bucky were the same person and, after what he did, he had to do, was forced to, but still did with his hands, Bucky was starting to think he had no right to live. But he also didn’t have the one to die. No, that was the coward way out, he had to face life with what he had done, with the ghosts that had started to hunt him in his waking hours too. The only thing he could concede himself was to keep his guilt at the back of his mind for the moment, to focus on what was really important. But Bucky knew he couldn’t keep that up forever. 

**

Bucky was tired. His head throbbed, something he hadn’t even thought possible, being a super soldier and all. 

He was sitting on the floor, near the door, eyes running from a detail of the room to another. 

Windows were still sealed, no one could see inside, but he could see outside good enough through the various cracks between the boards if he wanted to. He had gone back to real food and one of the disgusting protein drinks a day and to plain clothes, but had kept two knives and a Glock hidden on him. 

That was the problem, the reason his head hurt. He had to keep a constant balance between the two voices in his head. It was actually wrong to call them voices in that context because Bucky knew it was just him. That new version of him, a strange and scary one, but the one he was going to be forever. On one side what he felt was similar to his old self, just haunted by seventy years of killing and fighting to retrieve scraps of memories while fighting almost as hard not to think about why most of the things he actually remembered were about Steve. On the other side, instead, there was an engineered super soldier and killing weapon, with no memories, no identity, but a strong surviving instinct, who was plainly freaking out because of the lack of rules, missions and maintenance, and who almost wanted to be back in the hands of his captors, to go back to his cryogenic capsule and to that damn chair. Probably he also was on the verge of losing control, going out and kill people. 

So, yes, Bucky felt entitled to a headache, bad Chinese food on the floor near a bag of some of the most horrific thing he had ever drunk and a gun in the waistband of his jeans. 

He also felt entitled to having bought a new computer. Money wasn’t a problem in the safe house, he had plenty, and he needed a laptop to keep track of what was going on outside his hiding place. He also needed, or had wanted, he wasn’t totally sure, to really read and study and memorize, as much as possible about the HYDRA leaked files. And SHIELD. 

If, instead, he was watching a video about Captain America on youtube was a pure coincidence. It was a necessity to see stuff like that to remember. Maybe to watch Steve and himself laugh together with the other members of their squad was going to help him get back some memories. 

“Sure, that’s exactly why you’re watching that. You’re more obsessed about Steve than about facing the ghosts keeping you awake” once more the voice objected. This time it sounded more like his conscience rather than himself or the Soldier. One more reason to ignore it. 

He wasn’t going to linger on the ghosts. Sure, he knew he was probably going to do so for the rest of his life, he knew he had to pay for what he had done, for the monster he had become, but not at that moment. He was too weak, too confused and too scared by the soldier ready to come out and rule at the first hint of real weakness. Or of fear. And Bucky was full of that, terrified didn’t even start to encompass what he was feeling. 

So when he checked Steve’s mailbox was just because it’s been two days and it seemed strange that his friend, – was he still his friend though? Could he be after what Bucky had done? Sure not – apparently so eager to talk to him, had suddenly disappeared. 

“Maybe he just changed his mind. Maybe he has really thought about the monster you’ve become and he ran. You’re no longer Bucky, you are the Soldier now, he can’t love you and you can only go back to be the weapon you are designed to be” but Bucky shook his head at the voice. He knew he couldn't go back, because he wasn’t going to let HYDRA win. It was like disarming a bomb, except he needed to defuse the wiring in his brain while retrieving the more information he could. And while keeping that brain from exploding. And himself from breaking down. 

Almost as a sign of defiance at his own head, he went and took the bed mattress, dragging it at the front door. 

Good, he was going to be a good soldier and keep track of all the entryways, but he was going to do so while laying on something comfortable since his last episode had the couch destroyed. He felt a wave of nausea and his head throbbing harder at the thought. What had they done to him? How messed up his brain really was? A common sound and he had gone into full soldier mode, to the point of torturing himself. If something that simple was a trigger he couldn’t think of what the activation words could still do to him. Were those enough to delete Steve from his memory once more? Was he going to forget everything again if someone ever was to retrieve that terrible word sequence, or the chair, hopefully now destroyed, was required? He could only think of one thing worse than going back to be the Soldier and it was for Bucky to keep thinking while he had no control over his action. Like some kind of waking nightmare. Kill like the Soldier while thinking and feeling like Bucky. 

He wanted some Whiskey, he wanted it so badly.

“It wouldn’t have any effect on you anyway. But you could try with Vodka” his brain supplies in a dark joke. Bucky was really starting to hate the voice in his head, even if it was just him talking to himself. 

**

_He feels the soft breath still, under his flesh hand, but he doesn’t let go, he knows he has to hold and squeeze for at least another minute. His eyes dart to his left, the woman was dead, her neck broken, leaving her laying in an unnatural position. There is something almost poetic in such a beautiful creature laying like that, spent, gone. The man on his right, instead, lays like scum in the middle of a pool of blood. There is nothing poetic in him, only an enemy dead on his knees, begging without honour. He was his mission, and he has proved himself a low life as the Soldier had expected._

_He laughs._

_The time is right, he lets the body fall on the floor like a useless thing._

_The kid looks at him through glassy dead eyes. He stares back._

_Collateral damage. No instructions about not having any, so his mission is to considered completed without problems._

_He looks at his hand, covered in blood. It means nothing to him, just a bodily fluid._

_There’s a pull at the back of his mind, something almost painful. No wounds from this simple mission, but he’s sure that strange thing must be a cranial trauma he hadn’t noticed while breaking in._

_The glassy eyes keep staring at him and the strange feeling intensifies. He rolls the body away with his foot, but even laying with his face down he can see one of the eyes._

_The dead boy seems committed to stare at him in his death_

**

Bucky screamed and screamed, crawled and scrambled into the bathroom trying to wash his face, but he ended up vomiting in front of the sink, instead. His head was killing him, more pain that he could take, and it was something said by a super soldier who’d been tortured for seven decades. He forced himself to keep his eyes open, to stare at the tub, not to even blink, to stop seeing those dead eyes, but it wasn’t enough, it seemed those glassy iris were reflecting on the walls, all around him. 

Another wave of nausea, but he just gagged. His head throbbed worse, he had to lean his back against the door jamb while sitting on the cold floor. 

He could remember everything from that night. Every tiny detail of that mission. He could remember the man’s begging, the woman’s cries and the complete silence of the boy. He hadn’t uttered a word, a plea. He had known he was dead even before the Soldier could decide. That boy hadn’t been part of his mission, but the Soldier had been trained to never leave eyewitnesses, part of his efficiency was that he was nothing more than a ghost. There hadn’t even been a decision, he had just grabbed the boy by his throat and crushed his trachea. Simply as that. 

Bucky forced himself, desperate, but what he couldn’t remember was a single feeling about that night. He had felt nothing. Just another day at the office to him. He hadn’t spared a single thought about a dead kid, killed while watching his dead parents. 

He felt like screaming, but the wiring in his head stopped him from doing something so stupidly dangerous, the self-preservation programmed in him even in a moment like that. So he did the only other thing he could think of. 

To reach the mattress once more felt like a long journey, not a few meters of shaking legs and maybe a little more crawling than walking, but the keyboard felt familiar under his fingers, no need to watch it while typing. 

_Steve, I killed a boy. He couldn’t be more than eight and I killed him. I think it was 1987. I strangled him, more like crushed his throat into nothing. I felt him die under my hand and I kept squeezing. I killed a kid and he had just been a mission_

Save. Close. Close the laptop.

Bucky fell on his side, the computer still in his hands. He felt a terrible pain in his chest and the headache was now enough he was starting to freak out. He wasn’t sure he could breathe, he felt like someone was squeezing the air out of his lungs and it actually seemed kind of poetic. He moved his flesh fingers and felt like pins and needles. Something was terribly wrong with his body, he probably was going to die, maybe something they had done to him was to have him die if he wasn’t going to have some kind of maintenance from HYDRA. Maybe, probably, for sure, it was a good thing if he was going to die. But he was scared. Not now, not while he was fighting so hard to get his memories back, the good ones, at least. 

Panic raised in his throat, breath turned even raspier, more difficult. He was going to die, the same way the kid had died by his hands. And his last words to Steve were going to be the admission of the most horrible of all the crimes. 

His heart was beating too fast, he could no longer feel his hand and now he couldn’t even think, just close his eyes and try to ignore the dead ones staring back at him. 

That was like the Soldier was going to end. It seemed like a fitting one. But he wasn’t the one feeling the blinding pain, both physical and mental. It was actually Bucky being tortured. 

“Fuck off, I won’t die for you, you monster. I don’t want to die like that!” the voice in his head spat at the Soldier, but it got laughed at and the headache got worse.


	5. 5.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No notes this time! No warnings, well, maybe that by the end you'll probably want to hug Steve. 
> 
> The phone number I got from a random generator from Google, so I guess it's fake.

Steve had been on a mission and another HYDRA base was destroyed. He had made it out worse for wear, enough that Natasha herself had forced him into a hospital to check bruised organs and, apparently, broken bones. 

The fact was that, once more, Steve didn’t care for any of those things. If he could barely notice pain after the helicarrier, at that point he couldn’t even remember what a bone was. 

He just sat there, in that hospital bed with sheets too clean and stiff, ignoring the annoyed glares from the nurses every time his heart rate or breath got too fast and they had to rush to check on him just to have him dispel them with a vague gesture.   
The truth was that every time it happened it was because he was actually panicking, nothing to do with his actual health. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about what he had found in that base. Small stuff, little more than breadcrumbs and jigsaw pieces, but things that gave him a new, and more horrific, insight on the birth of the Winter Soldier. 

Steve tried not to go there again, knowing he was already on the verge of a panic attack, but his brain didn’t seem to agree. 

His brain couldn’t agree. 

Because it had taken HYDRA ten years of medical experiments to get the Winter Soldier, ten years of surgeries, and who knows what else, on Bucky, getting him in and out of cryostasis. There hadn’t been details on the files, so old there had been no trace of them in the stuff they had leaked, those were still written on paper, yet Steve knew probably they never cared about Bucky comfort. Steve was also secretly grate there had been no details, he wasn't sure he could take more. Probably most of those experiments had been done on a conscious Bucky, totally able to feel pain and fear. Probably they considered it some sort of first training. 

And yet that wasn’t the worst thing that kept tormenting Steve. 

What had turned his thoughts into a nightmare was what he had read on another folder, nothing more than a few scrawled notes, but enough to kill him inside. It had taken HYDRA years to condition Bucky, to get over his fighting back, to find a way to really shut him up. For years they’ve scrambled Bucky’s mind while he had been still there, still trying to grasp at his consciousness. 

Bucky had known he had been losing. 

Bucky had known he was slowly fading into nothing. 

Steve couldn’t breathe at the idea. 

He had found nothing more about that twenty years, vague references to other files, stuff that had been no longer in that compound. Maybe they had been destroyed, lost forever. 

Steve wasn’t sure for what he hoped. To find more, to know what had happened to his best friend, or to never know what he had to endure. 

He pointedly didn’t think that there had been blood on the pages because in decades it could have been anyone’s blood. He pointedly didn’t think that it had really looked like spat blood. 

He shut his brain up when it hinted once more at the idea of a restrained Bucky fighting with all he still had got. 

**

Steve had hoped that being home would have helped to calm his thoughts, that the whiteboard he and Sam were keeping, already filling with details of their next operation, would have been enough to get his head away from the dark places his fantasy kept constructing, every one of them with Bucky in a different stage of torture. 

His wishes were empty ones. 

Being in New York only had him thinking even more about Bucky, about the past. About being normal, before the War, just two guys trying to survive and have fun. He had to admit he’d have gladly gone back to that constant sickness just to go back in time and hold Bucky again, just to see his smile. 

Asthma never hurt his lungs and chest like that constant anxiety was doing. 

The noises outside his window had never felt so alien as that moment, so wrong. 

He just wanted their tiny apartment back. Their never-working hot water, to fall asleep on Bucky’s leg while he read on the couch. 

He just wanted back a man he knew was long dead. 

He had lost that Bucky the moment he had left to fight in the war, he had always known that, but now, even if he was ever going to get Bucky back, what was he going to find? All right, Bucky probably got back some of his memories, but how could a man go through hell and get out in one piece? What if he was never going to see a real trace of his Bucky again? 

Not his Bucky. Never his Bucky.

Those times were long gone too, forgotten to everyone but him, and it had been such a short time he knew there had never been a “his” anyway. It was just in his mind, in his chest, that it had felt different. But he had been just a stupid boy at the time, getting into fights he couldn’t win and his feelings for Bucky had been just one of those lost causes. 

Shaking his head as to clear it from thoughts, he pinned a sat photo to the whiteboard, too distracted to even know what he was actually doing.

He was trying not to compulsively check his email, but he was alone and so tired, he had a right to check it. It was his mail after all. Maybe someone wanted something important. Maybe Natasha was trying to communicate with him. Sure, via mail. Totally possible.

Steve sighed at how pathetic he had turned, trying to lie to himself like that. 

He logged in any way. 

And he thanked God when he saw the messages. 

He didn’t breathe while reading the lines.

The first message sounded a little off, but it actually gave him some hope about Bucky’s possibilities to go back to something similar to what he had been, the second mail, instead, felt like a cold shower.   
Steve could almost see, imagine, Bucky while he had been writing that. 

So much pain, so much desperation. What was his friend really going through? 

He was getting back who he had been in the past and, at the same time, he was retrieving memories of the most horrific things he had done. Was that enough to break someone’s mind? Steve was sure it would have been more than enough to break his, but that was Bucky, he had always been stronger. He had fought against HYDRA conditioning, he wasn’t going to break now. 

The thought sounded unconvincing even to his brain. 

It took him three tries to actually open a new draft, his hands shaking too much, but then he just stared at the white page. 

What could he say to someone suddenly remembering he had crushed a child’s throat? Steve gulped, at a loss of words. But it wasn’t to someone he needed to write to, it was Bucky. He had always known what to tell Bucky. 

_Bucky, it wasn’t you, it had never been you. You were asleep and someone else was using your body, monsters were wearing you like a costume, you never killed that kid, HYDRA did, using the man they had taken from you_  
Steve stopped, took a breath, started to pace around the room. 

Apparently, he didn’t really know the words at the moment, because he knew Bucky well enough to know he was going to call bullshit on that empty reassurance. He sat back, put his fingers on the keyboard and tried not to think. Instinct was all he had left, the only thing he could maybe trust.

 _I found new intel, if you don’t remember I can tell you, you never made things easy for them, you fought hard not to have them win, you fought for that kid more than anyone could have, more than I could even imagine doing. You fought them for years, Buck, and you still are. You had a mission and you purposely failed it, your mission is sitting in his living room writing to you, and now you’re getting yourself back. See? You’re fighting their control and you’re winning.  
I know you’re trying to get to terms with everything, but don’t try and fight that alone. 202-555-1169 That’s my number, please call me, we can work together on your thoughts, memories, through your pain, it’s something too big for you to fight alone, you don’t have to_

Steve stopped again, wondering how much like a plea it sounded. Was he a monster for wanting Buck to call him as much as to help him as to hear his voice? He needed to hear his voice, Bucky’s voice, to feel he really was alive, to experience that warm feeling he had had for one second, on the carrier, seeing THAT look in his eyes. 

_Don’t worry, SHIELD is gone for good, it’s only me and a few friends now, no organization whatsoever and no one is looking for you. I mean, I would be, but you asked me not to, so I’m only focusing on destroying as many HYDRA bases as possible. You are safe, Buck, no one is looking for you, no one will hurt you again, you only have to get better and regain your memories._  
Was he really sure that to get his memories back was what Bucky wanted, though? Because he apparently was going to get back all the Winter Soldier’s memories too, and Steve didn’t wish such a thing to anyone. Ok, he wished worse tortures to HYDRA members, but that was a different thing. 

No, being Bucky he’d be probably fighting to get his memories back as hard as he could. And to think it was him the one with a masochistic and self-sacrificing streak. Still painful memories were the only thing between Bucky and the Soldier, he’d either embrace who he was or let his brain empty, his conscience silent, and go back to be HYDRA’s puppet. Steve knew there really wasn’t a choice for Bucky. Maybe for lesser men, but not for him. 

_Don’t worry, as soon as you’ll get acquainted with what they call music nowadays – let me tell you, we missed a few interesting decades, but this one I’d rather skip – and learn how to endure it, things aren’t so different and difficult_  
Except everything was different, even food taste, or food in general, definitely there hadn’t been sushi or Thai where they had come from. 

And people.

People had been so different back then, now most of them looked like they just existed like everything was just something passing near them, without really touch them. 

Steve couldn’t help but think that there were good things too in the new millennium. Like the fact that no one would care if he’d say to Bucky what he really felt. Not that he was ever going to, not that he was ever going to break down in front of him and tell him how much he missed his smile, his eyes, his scent. But in an ideal world…well, things now would have been very different between the two of them. 

He saved the draft and deleted the ones left by Bucky, but then he opened a new one. 

_You liked your pancakes with chocolate. You liked movies with Katharine Hepburn and always desired a motorcycle. Try to smell shoe polish, the good stuff, it still exists, it could remind you of when you were getting ready for a date, you used to polish your good shoes and throw the dirty rag at me for mocking you. You are allergic to raspberries and you hate honey, or at least you used to. You used to love thunderstorms, but now they’re a trigger to me, I guess they won’t be good for you either, the weather forecast said there’s going to be a storm in the next few days, so maybe buy some headphones and try some ‘70s music.  
You always told me you were cooking them for me, but you like spaghetti a little too much, you can admit it now. But not meatballs, you’ve always liked them more separately from your pasta.   
When you were really upset it helped if I sang “Hush little baby” to you, it reminded you of when you were a kid and your grandma used to sing it. Yes, you teased me to no end, and I teased you because you'd blush so hard, but it worked, so I used to just ignore your embarrassed protests. Maybe search for it on youtube. _

It was a stupid mail, probably he should have just deleted it, Bucky didn’t need that kind of help, but since it was the only kind he had to give… There were so many little things that kept coming to his mind, like Bucky being scared of scorpions, but you don’t get to be the Winter Soldier and still be scared of a stupid animal, so that was something useless to tell him that, as it was useless to ask him if his left toe still hurt when it was about to rain, it used to after he had broken it during a fight. 

Probably Bucky no longer cared about liking blue more than green either and he wasn’t going to be cold if he fell asleep on the couch, he no longer needed to get a blanket to nap. 

But going back to things that could actually still be the same and jostle his memories…oh, Steve smiled.

_You loved cats, once you brought one home, so tiny, you were heartbroken when the kid next door claimed it back. Check your apples, once you almost ate a worm and I didn’t hear the end of it for days you moaned so much about it, so you always checked them thoroughly after that, guess it could be a good habit to maintain. Don’t drink orange juice though, it’s disgustingly different from what we are used to, even real oranges taste different!_

Steve was sure that was more than enough, probably Bucky was going to laugh at his expenses, his Bucky would have, maybe the new one would too. He guessed it was okay anyway if the message succeeded to at least have him laugh, even if it was because of how stupid Steve was. He was ready to humiliate himself a thousand times just to have Bucky smile. 

Once more he saved the draft, this time, though, he made sure to close his computer before he could write something else embarrassingly stupid and he started to pace around the room. 

He needed to focus on HYDRA, on their next target, Sam was already working on it, but he couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t stop thinking about Bucky’s messages, so different from what he had expected, so…vulnerable. He had never seen or heard him like that before. He had saved him from torture, from being prisoner, from Zola experimenting on him and he hadn’t been even vaguely like that, he had joked even then. How really broken was he now? Was he too far gone to really save him? Steve was so scared Bucky had escaped from HYDRA just to become a haunted shadow of his old self, unable to cope. Sure, he was strong, but how strong one really needed to be to overcome something like that? And he had sounded so frail in those emails.

Steve had never needed so badly to hug someone. It was a physical need. One he knew he wasn’t going to satisfy for a long time, if ever.


	6. 6.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost done, two more chapters to go ;)
> 
> There's a crude flashaback about war in this one, toward the end, you're warned. I can't think of any other trigger.

The room Bucky was sitting in was dark, just a lamp in a corner on the other end. He didn't need a lot of light to see and he didn't need to see a lot at the moment, anyway. 

He had bought milk without even thinking about it, just another thing to fill his stomach in spite of the Soldier talking in his head, it had been the moment he had actually tried to drink it that it had triggered a memory, out of the blue. 

He could remember Pierce offering him a glass of it. The bastard had deliberately done that to tease him, to humiliate him. Just a glass of milk and Bucky, no, he hadn't been Bucky at the time, just the Soldier, couldn't say yes or no, he could no express his opinion on wanting some fucking milk because he couldn't have an opinion. Not with Pierce, not with anyone at HYDRA. Had the man ordered him to drink the milk he'd have done that without thinking, same if he had been forbidden to touch it, he'd have starved rather than sipping it. But an offering...an asset didn't get a choice, an opinion, a voice. And Pierce had given him a choice instead than an order just to remind him of that once more. 

“So, now you are happy you can drink it? Are you really so pathetic?” the voice in his head said, and Bucky didn't even know if he had to fight it or what. 

Was he about to drink it just in spite of Pierce? Was he about to drink it just because, a few minutes before, he had stopped himself from grabbing the glass, triggered by the memory and, he had to admit, sheer panic? 

“Isn't that stupid? All the things they had done to you and you freak out because someone teased you?” that voice again, except it sounded a lot more like his own, like something Bucky would have said to himself rather than the sharp words of the Soldier. 

Maybe the problem was that that particular memory was one of the most recent, he remembered nothing of the last days with Hydra, just the helicarrier. He had read some about those days, on stolen newspapers, but he couldn't remember the fight on the street – so many casualties, so many innocents so badly hurt, more blood on his hands – or the homicide of Nick Fury. 

“I have a choice. I have free will. I am James Buchanan Barnes” he said to the empty room, to himself. He wasn't totally convinced, but he was going to repeat it over and over until his entire brain was down with that. 

Bucky drank the glass of milk in one go. 

At least he now knew he could add milk to the list of things he didn't like, he mused. 

He didn't feel better, though. 

He struggled to remember something more, he had to. How was he feeling sitting on that chair, in that dark room, hidden by the shadows, while Pierce reminded him once more of how he was nothing more than an object? 

The Soldier hadn't been able to identify feelings, he had to endure and ignore them, but, after days, Bucky was certain they had always been there, deep down, but inside the Soldier chest. Sure, no good feelings, there had never been pity in him, remorse, but he had felt about himself.

Humiliation, hatred, pride for a well done mission. That he had felt even if ignored. As he had deeply felt pain and fear. 

And now Bucky was fighting to remember these feelings, to link the shards of his memories with them. 

He isn't sure about the milk, everything that happened in a more recent time somehow was more blurred in his head, fewer details, definitely not enough to catch the feelings that were so deeply hidden. Still, it didn't take him much to know there had been a lot of rage inside the Soldier in that living room. Maybe humiliation, but given what he had faced in the past, what they had done to him, he wasn't sure the Soldier could have been bothered to feel humiliation for something so little. 

He grabbed the journal from the counter and started writing all that down. It had started that thing a few days prior, in fear of forgetting one of the so painfully regained memories. It had two different section, one for the Soldier's memories, one for Bucky's. 

The first one he'd rather no go back to read, they were mostly plain facts, the snippet of missions, names, weapons he had used. And too many paragraphs of what had been done to him by HYDRA, an almost cold list of wounds and tortures and abuses. But he had written down every single one because every member still alive was going to pay for what had been done to him, and he wanted to remember the most possible when he was going to kill them. Ok, he knew that probably weren't the ideas of the old, good Bucky Barnes, that he shouldn't think about revenge if he wanted to become one of the good guys and all, that revenge wasn't something he should have been thinking about at all, but sometimes the rage was too much, the pain, and that was the only thing keeping him working. He thought he deserved the freedom of thinking about retaliation after seven decades. He also knew it was just an idea and he wasn't really going out to search for HYDRA goons. He wanted nothing more to do with Hydra. And maybe he also was a little scared of them, of falling back into their hands now that he was somehow so vulnerable. 

The second section of the journal, instead, was Bucky's memories, and that he loved to read, to dwell on searching into himself for more details. Opposite to the first one it was about facts, yes, but the emphasis was on the feelings and the sensations. They were a lot more complicated to write down, but he had needed to. He even liked to.

Most of those words were actually about Steve. 

Bucky didn't know why or how, but a whole page was dedicated to how Steve's skin had felt under his fingers. It wasn't a real memory, just a flash of creamy, smooth skin, but it had taken so many feelings with it. Bucky had written about it for almost an hour. About the slide of his fingers, the scent, the goosebumps, the texture... He had also gone back more than once to read it again, almost ashamed of it and wondering why he knew such things, why of everything he was missing his brain decided that Steve's skin was an important piece to retrieve from oblivion. 

Even if a lot of the scrambled words were about Steve, luckily there were also a lot of other things, Bucky's things. He loved the smell of rain in the summer, he had remembered he loved to dance and the first time he had drunk too much. Little things, stupid ones for anyone else, details people forget or ignore, but those were everything to him. 

**

He had run. 

When his nightmares had woken him up in the middle of the night he had gone out and ran. And then he had run some more until even his trained and enhanced muscles had started to hurt. At that point, he had to run back home, because a guy in a sweater and a baseball cap, exercising at seven in the morning was to draw less attention than the same guy on a half empty bus. 

Now, half splayed on the floor half on the mattress, he had to admit the physical exhaustion was actually helping. 

He was, had been since the first moment, paranoid, he had always checked any entry and exit point, how to get on the higher place, what to use as an improvised weapon in every room or shop he had entered. The apartment was basically a vault, not even light cracking in and he had tried to get out the less possible. 

Bucky knew all that wasn't helping with whatever was going on with his brain. The only reason he could stay still even before the war, even before becoming a soldier and then a weapon, had been to lay next to a sick Steve. 

Now he was a super soldier, his organism worked fast, his brain too, he wasn't programmed to lay low like that, not for so long. He was programmed to get out and fight. 

No. No, he couldn't think that. He wasn't programmed, not at all. Because he was a human being, he was Bucky, his mind was free.

“Yes, keep telling that to yourself,” the voice in his head mused, and Bucky noticed how his thoughts and the Soldier's were starting to blur and mingle. 

Anyway, the voice was sort of right, he knew his thoughts still weren't totally his, that he still was someway brainwashed and influenced. But he was free to think even that, so he considered himself free anyway. 

Totally free...he knew that was something he wasn't ever gonna be. At that point he was the Winter Soldier as much he was Bucky Barnes. He only needed to find a way to balance the two things. Running had felt like a good starting point. 

Satisfied by what he had done and decided so far, he rolled on the floor, got on his knees and reached for his laptop. 

Bucky wasn't sure when had been the last time he had checked if there was a message from Steve, between the moments of confusion, the absurd sleeping pattern and being closed in that apartment, time was slipping between his fingers. Or maybe it was going too slow.

He smiled when he saw the two messages. 

He needed to remember more, there was still something he couldn't grasp because he didn't understand why the idea of Steve writing to him had that warm feeling spread through his chest. 

Sure, he was his best friend, he had been all his life, he had saved him, he had almost died for him and, maybe – even if the voice in his head kept telling him the contrary – was the only person out there not hating him at the moment. 

Yet Bucky can't get why such an intense feeling just at the idea of him.

He remembered the Howling Commando, the men who had fought by his side, ready to lay down their lives for him. He remembered almost all their names and that he loved them, yes, he could recall the exact feeling of loving someone like that, but sure enough, to think about them didn't bring a warmth to his body. 

Maybe it was because Steve was family. But he was starting to remember his sister and the rest of his family and he felt..melancholy, love, the strong feeling of missing them, her, the desire of one last hug. But nothing that could compare to how his mind and body reacted to the idea of Steve. 

Probably he should have written that down too, but the emails were in front of him and he was done being stopped from doing what he wanted, so he clicked it instead. 

The first one he read quickly, glad to find out he wasn't under immediate threat, taking in the information about the music and almost laughing at how Steve probably really thought what he had written, that that new world wasn't so much different to theirs. The part where Steve tried to convince him of how good and pure he was, Bucky just ignored.

The second mail, instead, hit him deep, a punch in the guts, a rush of blood to his face and his chest. A sort of nausea, like his stomach just flipped, but in a good way. 

He read it three times, then he just stared at the screen. 

So many information about himself, a few he recalled, the orange juice he had already found out at his expenses, but the others...were nothing important, stupid things that changed nothing in his healing process.

“That's what you think you're doing hiding in here? Healing?” it was a reprieve, not a tease, and it was definitely his own voice. But Bucky ignored it, went back to stare at the mail.

Those little things made him feel like he was really like he could really go back to being Bucky instead than a monster. And somehow they were even more important since it had been Steve telling him. 

Steve had taken the time to write down little, stupid, personal things about Bucky. Even more, after seventy years Steve had bothered to still remember how Bucky had eaten his pancakes. Steve had thought about him enough to worry that he could be triggered by a thunder. 

Bucky wasn't crying, he was sure it still was sweat on his face.

He was feeling some sort of happiness, something bittersweet that made him feel almost worse. 

He was betraying Steve, leading him away from the truth. He had led Steve into thinking he still was the Bucky he had known, that he could go back to be him. He had fed Steve lies, apparently, because now his friend believed there still was something to save. 

But Bucky didn't feel like he could be saved anymore. 

Sure, he was fighting with nails and teeth to go back to be a human being, to regain his memories and keep his free will, but his humanity had gone lost a long time before, decades, when he had started being an assassin, when he had stained his soul with the blood of innocent people. 

He had killed a kid, for fuck sake! And he had confessed so much to Steve! How could he still care about him, how could he be still playing like everything was okay like Bucky just needed a few pancakes and a hug? He was lost, long gone! If he still had a soul, and he wasn't even sure HYDRA hadn't torn it out of him too, with knives and fists and whatever else, it was dark and dripping with blood. He didn't even deserve pancakes or kittens. He'd probably kill kittens without even realizing he was doing so! 

He was a monster! 

Monsters don't check apples, monsters only deserve the rotten part of the apple. 

He closed the laptop without even logging out. 

He felt bad, worse than he had felt in days, split between his conscience, the knowledge he was a monster who had killed dozens, and the need to curl up on the floor and cry out for Steve. 

He felt frail and vulnerable but he knew he deserved to feel bad. The kid, the women, he had killed could no longer feel something at all. 

So, his brain and heart be pulled in two different directions, ripped apart, was the punishment for what he had done? 

It didn't matter that he had been under the HYDRA control, that it had been the Soldier at the wheel, it was his fault anyway for not fighting them hard enough. He had let them turn him into that monster, at some point he had almost stop fighting, he had almost embraced the cold nothingness of the first seconds into the cryogenic tank. It was his fault because he hadn't died.

His death would have saved so many lives. But no, he had grasped at his own existence, he had let them delete him from his body, and then reprogram him like a bad video game.

But he had liked chocolate and kittens and maybe polished shoes. And for seventy years Steve had grasped at those memories, he had kept them, revived them, maybe even smiled at them. He had maybe been happy to write those things in the email, to share them. 

So, maybe, Bucky was also feeling guilty for not appreciating them how he should, for letting his friend down on that too. He had been given something precious to Steve and all he could do was to freak out and turn it into a nightmare. 

He opened the computer again, but he shut off the mail tab. He couldn't reply to that, not yet, at least. Instead, he opened a new empty tab and, forcing himself not to think too much about it – and ignoring the fake gag sound offered by the Soldier in his head – he googled “kittens”. 

Little, cute ball of furs, sure, but Bucky wasn't exactly feeling like devoting his life to feeding strays and comb kittens fur. He couldn't even say he was overwhelmed by some kind of love for them, it was a few photos of young animals, with big eyes and all, but nothing that.... he stopped suddenly, his thoughts out of tracks. 

The cat in the photo wasn't cute. The fur was wet and dirty, too skinny, he looked like he wasn't going to live for long. He was like the Steve of his memories, he was like...

Bucky could suddenly recollect the event Steve had talked about in his mail. The tiny, sick thing he had taken home, so tiny he had feared he was going to hurt him while using his jacket to keep him warm. But he also remembered Steve sneezing at the little thing and yet giving his last glass of milk at the kitten, smiling fondly at Bucky, not at the animal. Steve with his big heart, allergic to cats but helping to save a life. Steve, who had probably partly done that for Bucky too, who had been ready to live with puffy eyes and sneezes and probably a worsening in his asthma, just to see Bucky smile. 

Bucky pushed the laptop away from him. 

No matter how rotten he was, he was probably worse than he thought anyway, there was just one thing in his head. 

He wanted Steve. 

He needed to feel Steve, to know if his memories were real, to ask him so many questions. 

“Maybe to kill him, while you are at it. Your last mission, the only one you failed. The one you made me fail. Are you so sure you can control the Soldier when in front of Rogers?”

Bucky wasn't sure he could control the Soldier, he could override his programming fully, but apparently, he had learned that Steve was the program to override everything else. 

There was a string of words to activate the Winter Soldier, there was a word to instantaneously stop him. But Steve's words had been a lot more powerful. 

_'Till the end of the line_

Six words powerful enough to push aside seventy years of scrambling his brain. 

“Or maybe you're wrong, maybe you'll kill him.”

Maybe. 

The doubt was enough to stop Bucky from doing anything. It was too soon and too dangerous. 

He still used HYDRA protocols in his mind, he relied on them when everything was too much and something was so deeply implanted in him that he almost missed being only an asset, being ordered around, choices, thoughts and pain taken from him. He felt even worse when he found himself thinking like that, but he couldn't help it. 

**

_It's cold. His hands hurt, the trigger feels like burning needles under his finger, he can't even feel where he's holding the handle of the rifle._

_But the smell is worse._

_It's blood and shit and whatever else mixed with the acrid one of the gunpowder._

_He has already puked twice, he is basically laying in his own puke, but he feels like he's going to do it again. If he isn't going to die before he could._

_Almost everyone around him is dead, the sound of the moans and gasps of the wounded almost as loud as the bombs. Someone calls for his mother, another just screams and cries. The guy a few meters from him almost looks asleep, silent, slow breath, except his guts are outside of his body._

_Another wave of smell and he has barely time to turn his head before he vomits again._

_He's scared, terrified. Not to die, you don't enlist if you don't think that's what will probably happen. He's shit scared to just end there, crying for hours, alone, forgotten. He's scared he'll be another white face, a body ripped in pieces._

_He's scared because he didn't know war is like that. He expected to see bodies, to hear cries, but not that._

_Another bomb, a leg flies over his head, lands behind him with a soft thud._

_Bucky wants to cry, to scream, to vomit, but he can do nothing. He freezes, pulling the trigger again and again without even knowing he's doing it._

_Another man screams, one guy on his right is praying, or maybe repeating something about his mother._

_He can't._

_The rifle falling from his hand hits the ground with the same sick thud the leg had._

_He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to see what he's seeing._

_Stop the noise, please, make them shut up._

_He covers his ears with his cold hands, anything to stop the voices of the dying men. But the smell..._  
**  
That time Bucky wake up curled in a tight ball, not even screaming, just crying. He was shivering from the cold even if his body was covered in sweat. 

He didn't expect to dream about something like that. He was by then used to nightmares about him being the Winter Soldier, of terrible things, but never before he had dreamed about something out of Bucky's past. 

No, not a dream. 

The nightmare of something that had really happened. That had been a memory, one that even then, fully awake, Bucky could remember. His first battle. The first time he had learned what war really is. 

He didn't move, he stayed curled up, crying. He covered his mouth with his metal arm. He had learned that when he had been forbidden to make any sounds. To go against such a command would have meant a lot of pain, but no one had ever forbidden him from suffocating his own groans.

Now, though, he wasn't hiding his pain, he was fighting off that terrible smell that seemed to pervade the room, like a ghost, come from his past. 

He knew there was no smell, he knew the voices were just an echo in his head, those men long dead, but his brain knowing it didn't seem to matter a lot to the rest of him. 

He didn't know how long it took him to calm down, but the sun was starting to rise when he was finally able to sit and clean his face with the shirt he was wearing. 

His head hurt, his stomach was a mess and his flesh hand was still trembling, but something inside him was sort of relieved.

After days of turning back into the Winter Soldier during the night, after days of HYDRA controlling even his nightmares even now that he was free, he was finally dealing with Bucky. 

Sure, it still was a nightmare, but HIS nightmare. Bucky's fears, Bucky's horrors. It meant Bucky had gotten strong enough that he could override the Winter Soldier even in his unconscious. It meant he maybe really had a chance, even if a tiny one and in a future far far away. 

Bucky cautiously got up, testing his legs before he took the hand away from the wall and tried to walk. He was stable enough. He reached for the secret cabinet. The third drawer on the left. Six phones laid in an ordinate row. All untraceable, all burners. 

It was a bad idea, a terrible idea actually, but at that moment Bucky felt defiant. It was selfish, he had no right to, but he didn't care, he had been tortured for so long maybe, even being a monster, he deserved a single minute of slack. 

Thanking the amazing memory that came with whatever serum they gave him, or maybe with years of brainwashing, training and beatings, not that he really cared, he dialled the number he had read a few days before. 

At the second ring, he started to panic. 

At the third, he was sure it had been a very stupid idea.

At the fourth, he was about to hang up, when he hears someone pick up. 

Silence. 

“Steve? Are you there?” Bucky whispered in a voice that had never heard before coming from his lips. If he didn't know better, if he didn't know himself and the monster he was, he'd have defined that voice as young and innocent. 

The man at the other end of the phone gulped a few times, Bucky could feel him take a deep breath, he was nervous. 

“Bucky. I'm here, yes. I'll always be,” Steve replied in a broken voice and Bucky wondered if he was crying. He's not sure when it had been the last time he had seen Steve cry. Steve didn't cry. Steve had always been the stronger one. 

“I...I had a nightmare,” he mentally kicked himself even before the phrase was finished. Really? Was he to call someone in the middle of the night to cry over a nightmare? Probably HYDRA had scrambled his brain one time too many. 

There's the noise of sheets, of Steve sitting on the bed, then his voice again. 

“I often have them too,” Steve, always so noble he didn't even reprieve him, he tried to make him feel normal as if there was a single chance Bucky was ever going to be that again, “another homicide? You know that wasn't you, right?” He ignored that last part, he was so tired to fight with Steve about that. No, it wasn't that. 

Bucky wasn't tired. He was relieved. 

He realized at that moment that his heart rate had slowed down, his breath was almost regular and the shivering had stopped. 

He was feeling a calm that he had never felt before, something deeper and more real than when his mind was wiped clean. 

He could even think he felt good, protected. 

All because of Steve's voice. 

He was so fucked. 

“No, not the Soldier,” he answered the question after long seconds, “It was Bucky. His first battle.”

“The screams and the smell, right?” Bucky snorted, how could he have thought Steve wouldn't have known. Sure he knew. Apparently, Steve knew everything. Always. Especially if it was about Bucky.

“That. But I think it's good, means I'm getting him back,” it's a question more than an affirmation and Bucky was sure he could hear Steve's smile. 

“It is. Want to talk?” 

An easy enough question, an innocent one. 

Too much for Bucky. 

To chose if drinking milk or not was a decision he could face. To defy HYDRA by sleeping on a mattress was a decision he could take. But to talk with Steve? That was something big, something that required a lot of thoughts. To chat with him would certainly change things between them, change Bucky's current situation. He had to think about that, to plan forward! He didn't even remember when he had to take such a difficult decision. Free will. He had fought so long for that but at the moment he was cursing it. The last thing he had used his free will for had been on that train when he had chosen to die for Steve. Now that felt like an easier decision than the one to talk to him. 

How could someone ask so much of him! He had to consider all the possibilities, the dangers! What could something like that lead to! That was such a difficult decision!

“Yes, please,” he replied and he can hear the voice in his brain laugh at him. 

So he still had a working instinct, not just protocols burned into his brain. And he probably had to thank the voice in his head for the relieved sigh he got from Steve before he starts to talk again.


	7. 7.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, almost done ;) And finally we are at the happier (well... less painful?) chapters!

Steve couldn't say he was happy, he actually didn't even remember the last time he had been happy, but he couldn't deny he was relieved. 

In the previous week, he had talked to Bucky two times over the phone and he'd received a total of three text messages. 

He acknowledged they were off, nothing like the Bucky he had known in the past, but they had been from Bucky. Steve could imagine those words slipping from the luscious lips he had always loved so much. They meant that Bucky was still free, not captured back, that he was conscious and able to take decisions on his own. They meant Bucky was still there, Steve could still save him from...from...

From himself? From the monster he had been turned into?

Steve didn't know. He only knew he needed to save his friend, to have him back or to at least have whoever these infinite years of torture moulded him into. He had to admit he was ready to accept anything just for a glimpse of the real, old, Bucky. If he was still there somehow, at all. 

Still, the pain was so obvious in his friend's voice that his relief was always short lived. Bucky had confessed his nightmares, the memories of what he had done and what had been done to him, but what Steve knew was hurting him more he had never said. Bucky had never said a word about not knowing who he was any more. He hadn't needed to, because Steve had already known. Steve had felt like that just for a few days, just out of confusion, his identity never stolen from him, and those had been the most terrifying days of his life. He wasn't even ready to imagine how someone could feel without knowing for real. It wasn't even about the memories, it was just about “who am I? What can I do? I'm good or bad after all?”

The problem was: Bucky didn't want any help. 

Even worse, if he was going to ask for help, Steve didn't know how to give him any. 

That probably was one of the things that kept hampering his relief. He was powerless and unarmed. 

He could survive a building falling down on him but he couldn't help his bo... his best friend. Steve corrected in his brain. He didn't even know why he had thought that word. They'd never been that. They hadn't been when they jumped on that damn train. They had fooled around, shared something physical, but nothing important, nothing more than affection and, probably, pure physical need. On Bucky's side, at least. Steve couldn't even remember for how long he'd been in love with him, but that didn't matter. It never had. So he'd better delete that word from his brain, especially now. How could he even think something like that while his best friend was fighting just to exist, out there, alone? Bucky needed a friend, a real one, not some kind of perverted stalker.

His mind went back to that first phone call, to Bucky's voice filling his ear in the middle of the night. 

Steve wouldn't say his voice was broken, he couldn't even think to compare Bucky's voice to something like that. Or to being weak. It had been...vulnerable. Oddly open. The voice, in the past, he had only used when Steve had been really sick, apparently too much to make it through the night if not with some luck, and he had wanted to talk as if everything was normal. 

Yes, it had been Bucky's careful voice, reserved for when he didn't want to believe things were going to be a disaster. 

Steve could almost laugh at that idea. They were far past the disaster. Even the alien invasion looked like some minor hitch compared to how messed up Bucky – and therefore him – was at that point. 

The phone call, instead, hadn't been a disaster. Bucky had barely talked at all, he hadn't even said a lot about his nightmare, one that Steve had known well anyway from seventy years before, but he had listened to Steve's small talk, anything that Steve could think about, and Steve had heard his breath became more and more regular. He didn't even remember what he had actually talked about. It had been random things, nothing about them or their past, too scared to juggle some memory in Bucky's brain that he wasn't ready yet to face. Probably he had ranted about Natasha, Sam's running and stuff like that. He hadn't even been concentrated on what his lips had been babbling, only on Bucky's reactions. 

It was a pity the second call had been a lot shorter and a lot darker. 

Bucky hadn't given him time to calm him down, he had quickly uttered out something about protocols, handlers and being scared, stuff that had mostly not made sense to Steve, and then he had hung up, leaving Steve just space for one or two words. But even so short and confusing, it had been a call, a sign that Bucky was alive and more or less okay and that, even if maybe he didn't fully grasp it, he needed Steve. 

Steve loved being needed. Steve loved, even more, being needed by Bucky. Probably Steve needed to be needed by Bucky. 

“Should I call Natasha and tell her you finally got a girlfriend?” Sam interrupted his thoughts, kicking the leg of his chair. 

Steve looked at him, confused. Definitely, there wasn't any girlfriend involved, but since when Sam could read his mind and think something like that?

“You face, man,” Sam answered, and Steve frowned. He was totally reading his mind! 

“I've no idea what you're talking about,” he muttered, looking back at the papers in his hands. Sam laughed, the traitor. 

“When you're not lost in your daydreams you check your phone every two minutes as if your life depends on it. Not to mention the stupid smile you got yesterday when...” but the man was interrupted by the tone of Steve's phone.

Without even thinking, with reflexes he didn't know he had, not even during a fight, Steve took the phone from the pocket, but then he stopped. He wasn't going to show Sam how hungry he was to know if it was Bucky. He had no intention of letting Sam know about Bucky, not yet at least, and Bucky too had asked him not to blow is cover. 

Using all his calm and strength, oh, so much strength he didn't believe he had, he placed the phone face down on the table. 

“Aren't you going to see who's texting?” Sam teased, now sitting on the corner of the table. 

For a second Steve wanted to punch that smirk off of his face, but the last remaining part of his brain supplied that it wasn't Sam's fault, he didn't know and he was just teasing as any friend would do. 

How many times he had teased Bucky's about one of his girls. 

His fingers twitched with the need of grabbing the phone.

“I've no time for a girlfriend, you should stop talking to Natasha,” Steve objected with a sigh, but Sam just tilted his head, like he was studying him. 

“You're vibrating, Rogers. It looks like you're about to explode or something if you don't read that text in the next three seconds!”

“Still don't know what you're talking about. It's probably Natasha, or maybe Tony with some sick joke,” but Sam looked pointedly at his twitching hand. 

“Really?” he teased again, amused, “Please, read that message before you have a stroke, just tell me if it's something I'll have to almost die for,” he ended almost seriously, as if being killed because of a text message was a possibility...well, okay, Steve had to admit it actually was. But probably not that time. Hoped. 

“I promise it's something personal but not a woman or something that will get you killed,” he mentally added a “hopefully”, but gave Sam his most charming smile, phone already in his hand, fighting not to read the text and ignore his friend. 

“You all say that. Come on, read your message, it's time for a break anyway, I'll make coffee,” and Steve is sure he had never loved Sam as much as the moment he saw him turn and leave. 

He tried to get a composure, for his own benefit but discarded the thought and in less than a second the phone was up, turned and the message open. 

“You were right, I like chocolate on my pancakes. What can I eat now? -B” 

Steve absolutely didn't fist pumped the air because he was a mature almost-hundred years old man with a dignity. Or maybe he did it in an imperceptible way. Or at least one he was almost sure Sam hadn't seen. 

So he still had a good knowledge of Bucky's tastes, he could still be of some help. The second part of the message he didn't like, though. 

“Whatever you want that you like?” he texted back, confused. Sam was still busy with the coffee machine, so Steve let himself fidget with the phone nervously, but the reply didn't take long. 

“I know, but I'd rather not decide right now. -B” 

Suddenly Steve felt a knot around his throat and stomach. He didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. 

“Bucky, you are free, no one controls you, you're your own person, you're no longer the Winter Soldier, and I'm definitely not your handler who tells you what to do, you know, right?” his hand shook a little while he quickly typed. 

He didn't know a lot about what was going on in Bucky's mind, but it wasn't the first time that he gave hints that he wasn't feeling totally free. Or able to be free. Seventy years of orders and conditioning, Steve could see how lost Bucky probably felt at having to suddenly do everything by himself. He could also see how still present the Soldier was, still ready to fall on his knees and to obey. Steve knew it wouldn't have taken a lot to HYDRA to reverse all that, to turn Bucky back into their little, complacent, slave. The idea made him furious and nauseous. He definitely needed that coffee. Black and bitter. 

By the time the next text arrived Sam was pouring the drink in two mugs with the Captain America shield printed on them. 

“I don't need you to remember me this. I was just asking for a favour, not for you to train me into killing kids.” Steve flinched. 

That was the longer text he had ever gotten from Bucky and, apparently, it was because he had hit a nerve. He made a mental note to never mention handlers again and forced himself not to go back to the 103 files about Bucky's past, the report from the men who commanded him directly. 

He suddenly felt angry and scared. 

What if Bucky was going to interrupt all contact because of that mistake? Before the war, before everything, Buck had never been good at staying angry with him, but now things were so different, Bucky was probably going on only fuelled by anger and fear, and he had just let him down. 

Oh God, he had just remarked to Bucky that he had been a slave for decades, he had just underlined how he hadn't been free to decide what to eat if to eat at all. He had basically yelled at him that he knew what he had been turned into!

Steve could think of nothing worse than to read something like that from a friend. He was sure to Bucky it had felt like he was saying he was just a broken slave, he didn't have time to waste like that. 

He was sure Bucky had taken that reply in the nastiest possible way. 

“Sam, I'm a moron,” he whispered to his friend who was setting down the mug in front of him. 

“If it's not a woman, what kind of moron?” Sam replied without losing a beat. He sat in front of Steve and looked at him expectantly, but nothing showed he was waiting to know more about the mysterious person if Steve wasn't up to tell him yet. Steve knew he was lucky at having him, Sam was one of the best friends he could imagine. Except for Bucky, obviously. 

“The kind of moron who just hurt a dear friend letting him believe he's worth less than nothing, while said friend is already fighting with that problem,” he was almost sure he was watching at Sam with eyes that shredded his last bit of dignity, Tony would have probably called them puppy eyes, but Steve was up to abandon any dignity, everything, to know what to do with Bucky. 

“Tell him you're sorry and keep supporting him,” Sam only offered, Steve frowned, which in turn had Sam sigh again, “Look, if it's your friend and he's struggling I'm sure he knows you're struggling too. Maybe he's too confused to really care about it, but deep down he knows you don't have the solution in your hands, that you still don't know how to help. So just admit you're a moron and start again.”

“What if he doesn't want my help anymore?” Steve asked in a pitiful voice he was already regretting and Sam laughed in his face.

“Then I'm a white cheerleader. Come on, these files can wait until tomorrow, I'll go home to charm my goldfish into dinner and you take your time with your texts, alright?” 

Steve looked at his phone, then at his friend again. The last thing he wanted was to be alone with a phone that wasn't going to ring ever again, on the other hand, he knew he needed to be alone and concentrate on Bucky if he was in the mood of chatting. 

“Thank you,” in the end, he nodded with a worried sigh and Sam just nodded back and got up, patting him on the shoulder. He just stopped in front of the door, without even turning. 

“Steve, you know you can't shoulder Bucky and his burden all alone, right?” 

Steve's brain freaked for a second. So Sam now knew for sure he was having contacts with Barnes, which Steve was keeping secret while probably Sam and Nat were still working their asses off to find something, even a little trace. He really was the worst friend, maybe Bucky was right to call him out. 

Apparently, though, his friends liked him more than he thought because Sam sighed and half turned towards him with a smile. 

“I know he comes before any of us and I also know you wouldn't put us at risk, Steve. But you're putting yourself at risk and neither I or Nat want to see something like that. We won't intervene, but we won't let you get hurt for real.”

“I don't know where he is,” Steve babbled as if that was the justification for everything.

“On the other end of that phone, where's close enough to hurt you,” Sam added, “but I know what you feel, I'd do the same thing if I could get Riley back, so go on, write to him, I'd be with my goldfish if you need me,” he finished with a smile, a little worried one, but a smile nonetheless, and closed the door behind himself before Steve could say something more.

At least now he had some sort of blessing from Sam. He doubts he would ever have one from Natasha, but he really didn't care about that. But most important he was now free of focusing on Bucky and his messages. 

“Buck, I'm sorry, I didn't mean what you thought,” he texted. Or yes, he probably did, but not in the vicious way his friend was probably thinking, “I can help you. You could try fish, it's good for you, just try not to get it deep fried.”

Steve typed quickly. He didn't know how to do better, he didn't know what else to write. He could save the world from crazy gods and aliens but he was at a loss when it was about his best friend's mind. 

It took four minutes and thirty-six seconds for Bucky to answer, not that Steve was counting and keeping his breath. 

“Got pizza. - B”

Was that good? Did it mean Bucky was defiling him and making his own choice? He was up to have Bucky fight every single thing he was going to do if that meant for him to feel free to take decisions by himself. And Steve had to admit Bucky had already been good at ignoring him and his advises. He pointedly ignored, instead, than he himself had been even better at totally discard Bucky's suggestions or orders or even threats. No wonder both of them had almost died more than a few times.

He was at a loss at that, he had no idea what to tell him. It was like walking on thin ice and he had already heard it crack. 

“Good decision, just try not to eat just that?” he was sure Bucky was going to find at least ten insults and an outrage in just that sentence, but he needed a little more to work on. 

“I like pizza. You said I don't need your permission, jerk. - B”

Steve's heart skipped a beat. Or two. Did Bucky remember that, remember so much of their past? It felt pretty impossible, but it was also odd for him to suddenly use words like that. 

“That's my line”

Steve texted back. He fought not to get his hopes up. Probably Bucky had no idea what he was saying, probably he was thinking Steve lost his mind or something. He could almost see him, in front of his pizza, looking quizzically at his phone. Except that in his vision he was pretty different from the man he had met in the fights, in his vision he had short hairs and a sweet smile, like his Buck. 

For a moment Steve lost himself thinking how could Bucky be at that moment. Sure he hadn't bothered to cut his hair, plus they could be useful to hide his face. Maybe, just maybe, he had coaxed a tiny smile out of him. Steve struggled to imagine a smile on Bucky's face so different from the one he knew and loved, but he knew that whatever was going to happen that had been gone for good a long time before. Instead, he focused on one of the tired ones Bucky gave at random people at the end of the day, too tired for anything better but too nice not to smile back. Maybe they were similar to a true smile of that new Bucky. Maybe he had left his stubble to grow a little longer, probably not, Bucky had always said it made him scratchy, likely that hadn't really changed. His face was in all probability a lot paler and tired, Steve was sure Bucky had barely slept in days, weeks. From what he had gotten from the messages apparently Bucky was actually eating and exercising, so he should be at least all right physically.

The beeping of a text distracted him from his imaginary friend. 

“If I'm free I can take what I want. Time to eat. I'll contact you. -B”

This time Steve's heart definitely lost a few beats and his breath faltered. It had been true, he had really remembered. Bucky had memories of their past even before the war. Or at least little snippets of important things. 

It meant nothing, rationally Steve knew that, but it meant everything to his heart. Maybe one day Bucky would be going to have most of his memory. Maybe Bucky would love him as he loved him in the past. No, not romantically, Steve knew Bucky never loved him like that, what he wanted back, instead, was his real fairy tale, that being soulmates, his “'till the end of the line”. He knew it was wrong to hope, that he was only going to hurt himself in doing so, that he had to be careful not to push Bucky or to put too much weight on his shoulders, but for the first time since he'd been taken out of that ice he felt like he had some hope, like he could have a piece of his life, of his home, back. 

He had lost everything that day on the train, he had felt a pain like he couldn't even describe while he had watched Bucky fall to his death, something so strong for a moment he had been sure he had been going to die too. But he hadn't. He had fought and he had been the hero and he had embraced death just a little bit. And then, after years of peace, someone had grabbed him and forced him into a new world, into new pain and horrors he wouldn't have imagined in his nightmares. And he had faced it too, without flinching, ignoring the hole in his chest, because he was Captain America and he had to. 

For the first time that night, at that table with some absurd technology in his hand, he felt like that hole could somehow be filled again. Like there could be something more than pain and duty out there because he could live for those two things, but he'd rather live for Bucky. For that new, damaged, Bucky who loved pizza a little bit too much. 

If he was up to him he'd have already bought all the pizzeria of the city just for Bucky.


	8. 8.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are, at the end of this journey. Thank you all so much for reading <3 (well, I'm already writing some sort of sequel, but that's another thing for another day)
> 
> This chapter definitely is my favourite. Some more angst but finally we have the two of you stopping to be idiots...and ok, I'll stop before I spoiler you ;) 
> 
> I need to warn you that in the flashback (in italic) there's mention of sexual abuse, an handler touches Bucky's arm and chest and he knows the reason and what it would lead to. You can skip the flashback, if you want to avoid it. 
> 
> Just so you know, in my HC Bucky had been abused that way. What Bucky, instead, had taken from him, was the capacity of feeling arousal for himself. Mecanically yes, he could get hard, but since he had any self identity taken from him, since he had been hollowed, he couldn't feel. He couldn't like...see a naked man and feel horny, or think of sex and wanting it. He could get a casual erection because of random friction but he'd do nothing about it, unless he was said to do something, then he'd do like he'd do anything else, like he'd kill someone.

He could remember nothing more of that moment, could retrieve anything of what had been made to him, but it didn't take a genius to guess.

The room around him felt too much like one of the cells they used to keep him in between missions. Cold, a little mouldy, dark. It felt like the walls were closing around him like the space was getting less and less and the oxygen was being drawn away. 

Rapidly Bucky grabbed the jeans and the shoes laying on the floor near the mattress, then the Glock and other weapons that had neatly put under his pillow before laying down, and in a hurry, he went out. 

He couldn't stay inside one moment longer, he had to move, to evade that cell before someone came for him. 

He knew it didn't make sense, he knew no one was coming and he wasn't in a cell, but what made sense for his brain didn't seem to make sense for his subconscious, or whatever the hell was that was telling him to get away, to run, to stop HYDRA from hurting him again.

He couldn't take more pain, he couldn't take whatever they were going to do to him. He couldn't take to kill again. He didn't want to, he didn't want to be a monster. 

Once more he ran, hiding in the shadows, avoiding the street lights, the cars, ignoring the homeless people and the fighting cats. 

It felt like it was just him in the city like he could really run away from everything and everyone, far away. He could hide in the dark and no one was going to hurt him anymore, not even his head. 

He passed a tiny, dirty alley, something caught his attention, a strange, familiar, glint. But he had to run, he had to go away...

**

The sky was grey, it could either be early morning or late afternoon, Bucky couldn't say from the little he saw from the bushes he was hiding into. 

What time it was wasn't the only thing he didn't know. He had no idea of where he was or why he was there, hidden between some foliage.

What he knew, instead, was that his left side hurt and he was half covered in blood. 

Carefully, Bucky raised his white shirt and saw a long slash running from his rib-cage to his waist.

It was nothing to worry about, not with his fast healing, but it meant that he had fought with someone. He couldn't remember it, he could actually remember nothing at all, the last thing he could recall was he had got dressed and had gone out, after a nightmare. Then things went foggy and from there it was dark. 

He had slipped back into the Soldier. 

“It's the trauma, it's the result of what had been done to you for years, it's not you,” the voice in his head said, the one that was really starting to sound like Steve, but Bucky no longer had the luxury to listen to it. 

What had the Soldier done that night? Did he kill? Did he hurt someone, did he...

His hand was in his jeans pocket before his brain could ever get up with the idea, the dial easy under his fingers.

Ten rings. 

Then it probably was early morning, Steve always took a lot to reply at that time, he used to be out, running. 

But by the twelfth, he picked up. 

He took Bucky a moment to find the strength to talk.

“Steve?” he asked. He always asked, as if someone else could answer that call and hurt him. It was stupid, he knew.

“Yes, Buck. Are you okay?” Steve breath was irregular, short. He had been running after all. 

“I'm not sure,” he admitted for the first time, “are you in Washington?” Steve paused for only a second. 

“Where are you, Buck?” there was fear in his voice like he was terrified to hear something bad had happened. Bucky couldn't blame him, he was right, anything terrible could happen around him.

“I...I don't really know. I can only see a bridge, bushes and a dirt track. I'd rather not move at the moment,” he didn't say he couldn't, he was too scared to find out what he had done. He didn't say he was covered in blood and so unfit to walk among normal people. 

“If you send me a picture I can locate you, but I need to ask Sam for help,” suddenly Bucky had a flash of Steve during the war. It was the same serious and practical tone. He didn't sound worried or scared, only focused on finding the best way to slay the dragon and save the princess, he could deal later with anything else. 

Still, Bucky wasn't so sure he wanted for the two men to know where he was. Was it even safe for Steve to get near him? What if he lost control again, if suddenly his brain decided it had to complete the mission?

“Forget it, it's a bad idea,” he tried to sound convincing, but he was conscious he wasn't. Or maybe there was just no way he could lie to Steve. From what he recalled Steve had always known when he had been lying since they'd been kids. 

“I'll come in full Captain America gear,” and there it was Steve, reading his mind again even after everything, “but you still need to send me the photo and tell me if I can ask Sam,” why was he asking? Bucky didn't really need to know if he was going to tell Sam if Steve was getting there why did it mean to him for Bucky to...

It suddenly hit Bucky like a punch.

Steve was giving him a choice. He was asking him for permission, letting him know that his life was his and his alone. He was telling Bucky that he was free to choose even who knew where he was. 

Bucky had to swallow a few times before he could talk again. 

“Yes, yes, you can ask Sam, but come alone,” a clear request, because apparently, he could now do such things.

“Don't worry, it never was my plan to bring him. It's us, Bucky, it's okay,” Bucky felt anything but okay, but he said nothing.

“Please, also check if there had been some aggression, if someone got killed,” he added instead, “I can't remember, Steve. I know I fought, but I don't know who or why,” his voice was suddenly thin, he hated that, but if he was free to take decisions then he was also free to cut himself some slack. The voice in his head told him there was no such thing for a monster, but Steve's voice overrode it.

“I will. Send the photo and give me half an hour, I'm coming Buck,” a pause, a sigh on the other end of the line, “please, just don't run away,” so much pain in Steve's voice that Bucky's heart almost broke. For a second he blamed himself for that, but no, that was on the HYDRA tab. They had taken Bucky from Steve, they had sent his best friend to kill him. That Bucky knew, because Bucky knew he'd never been able to do anything to put his friend in such grief.

“I'll be here. Hang up, I'll send the photo.”

**

Twenty-eight minutes and thirty-six seconds. 

Bucky was great at counting time, a skill he had gotten together with the sniper one. What he didn't remember was how long such a time could feel. He had spent days totally still, posted on a roof to shoot someone, and suddenly less than half an hour felt unnerving. 

Twenty-nine minutes and seven seconds.

Someone was approaching him, the noise clear and fast on the dirt road, he could feel the land vibrating under his hand. He couldn't have told why, but he was sure it was Steve, like there was something familiar in the rhythm of the run. Guardedly Bucky partially got out of the bushes, in time to see his friend just a few steps from him, in his Captain America uniform from head to toe. 

Steve said nothing, he took the last step carefully, as if expecting Bucky to attack or rather, from what he could see from under the mask, to run away. 

He did neither, he just sat there, legs crossed, back scratching against the plants. Bucky couldn't remember he had ever felt so small. He suddenly felt powerless. Needy. 

He watched his friend fall on his knees in front of him. He had no shield. Had it even been recovered from the river?

“It's okay, I'm not dangerous,” Bucky said in a little voice. He couldn't be sure of that, but at that moment he was feeling a lot of things but to attack Steve was the last one, no, better, there really was no trace of it. 

“Not what worries me,” Steve replied, too calmly, too low, “Do you need medical attention?” 

What a stupid question! Sure he didn't! It was blood, it was a slash, why should he, why should they lose time like that, instead than...instead than talking about the real, important, topic.

“Who did I kill?” the question came out in a resigned tone, he didn't want to know but he had to. 

Steve gave him half a smile, he took off his mask. There was pain and fear written all over his face and Bucky's heart dropped even more. 

“Don't worry, you killed no one. You put a man in the hospital, but he'll probably survive. He was trying to rape a young woman, you actually saved her,” Steve recounted with a small smile and hope in his eyes.

“How do you know that was me? How did you know I...”

“It was you. The woman noticed something strange, shiny, with her saviour left hand,” Steve nodded toward Bucky's metal arm, “you should start wearing full gloves if you don't want to get noticed,” but before he could say more Bucky's head was already somewhere else. He could remember something, there was something there, at the back of his memory...

“A knife! I saw something glint in the dark, it was a knife, that's what triggered the Soldier!” he said triumphantly, but his enthusiasm died a second later at the idea that, anyway, the Soldier had been triggered. 

“No, Buck!” Steve's voice was almost horrified by the sudden change in Bucky's face, “It was you, you saved the woman. The Soldier would risk nothing, you would,” the man added, taking off his gloves and discarding them on the floor.

“But I blacked out,” Bucky felt embarrassed by how thin his voice sounded, he couldn't be so needy and vulnerable just because Steve was there. He wasn't a kid, Steve wasn't the hero who was going to save him. He was actually the monster Steve had to slaughter! But, like his voice, the man didn't seem to get the memo either, because slowly he reached a hand toward Bucky. 

“Can I touch you?” he asked, cautiously, and Bucky almost recoiled, because it was the first time in decades that someone asked if he could touch him, he'd been fair game for anyone for so long he almost couldn't get why someone would ask instead of just doing it. Unable to form the words he reached out, resting his hand on Steve's arm. 

The man looked at that like it was the most surprising thing he had ever seen. 

“I've no idea what's going on in your head, Buck, but you went through so much pain,” but Bucky stopped him

“Don't. Please stop now, I don't need your pity, it's the last thing I want to hear!” he almost shouted, suddenly angry. He didn't need Steve to say how damaged he was, he knew by himself, thank you so much. 

“Listen to me for once, jerk,” Steve started one more, ignoring his outburst, “I'm not pitying you, I'm just trying to say that you could even black out as Bucky! You've been hurt a lot while being fully yourself, your hurt isn't only coming from what they did, you did, as the Winter Soldier,” he raised his eyebrows as if waiting to see if Bucky was going to fight him. He wasn't. He couldn't fully grasp the concept, but he was too tired to fight Steve and he felt like he was going to have a lot of time to fight him later. 

Like...like there was going to be a later.

“What happened it's not on you, I trust you, Buck. 'till the end of the line”

“You don't even have an idea of who I am. _I_ don't know who I am,” Bucky protested.

“I know who you were, I'm ready to face whoever you are now, I really don't care.” Bucky couldn't help but roll his eyes at how sappy that sounded. 

At the same time, Steve reached out, barely touching the bloodied shirt. He hadn't asked, but Bucky knew it was just because he had taken his touch as permission. And Steve would always have permission anyway.

“It's really nothing, I estimated it's going to be healed by tomorrow morning,” Bucky observed, still distracted by that something that he couldn't grasp, that had been tormenting him for days now.

“But it hurts,” Steve interrupted his thoughts again, with that irritatingly sweet voice, like he was talking to a kid, like he was caring too much. Why should he have cared too much, it was him, Bucky, they were talking about! 

“It's just pain,” Bucky replied almost confused. Why was everyone always making such a fuss for not- life-threatening wounds?

Just to shut Steve up Bucky raised his own shirt, Steve didn't even hesitate, he traced a finger near the jagged line of the cut. 

That made Bucky shiver in a way he couldn't place nor remember. It was something strange, something almost electric. 

He looked at Steve in confusion and amazement and he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. 

Carefully, without understanding why he was suddenly so terrified, he reached to cover Steve's hand, still on his chest, with his own. It felt different than the other touch, still like a spark but somehow more loaded. It felt like...like the thing he couldn't grasp in his brain was suddenly starting to make sense. 

oh. OH.

“Steve, can I try something? I promise I'm not attacking you, I just need to know something but it wouldn't probably work if I just ask,” Steve looked confused but he hesitantly nodded. 

It had been a bad idea. Bad, bad idea, stupid Bucky. Because suddenly he couldn't find any courage in him, suddenly he was a coward. A scared coward. 

Suddenly he could see the skinny kid starting fights, in front of him, and he knew how much stronger the other had always been. 

He tightened his hand over Steve's, not to still him, just to get that feeling of safety the man seemed to radiate. 

To close his eyes and lean in took just a moment.

Steve's lips were a little chapped, a little too dry – he was nervous, Bucky's brain supplied – but under it soft and warm, the bottom lip seemed to fit perfectly between his. 

Bucky stayed like that for long seconds, unable to move, unable to really kiss, unable to care about the rigid stillness that got into Steve, allowing himself to be totally selfish for those few moments. 

He knew that feeling. He knew it well, he knew it like he never had enough.

It wasn't something new. 

He moved his head back, just the space to be able to speak.

“We already did that. We used to do that,” he murmurs, so low he knew Steve could hear him just because he had whispered it against his mouth.

“Didn't think you remembered us,” Steve said sharing the same breath, still rigid, but Bucky kissed him again, that time a real kiss even if a light one. 

His lips moved slowly over the man's, closed around that luscious bottom lip, gently sucking it.

“I don't,” another sentence murmured against his mouth, but then Bucky sat back. He didn't leave Steve's hand though, he wasn't ready to, “I'm sorry, I don't remember being with you,” somehow that felt crueller than anything that was ever done to him. For some reason to say it to Steve felt worse than trying to kill him. He had a right to remember. He had a right to tell Steve their shared moment of intimacy were there!

“You weren't. Sorry, I mislead you, we never...we never talked about that, we weren't a couple, we...” Bucky shook his head, almost laughing.

“Please, Steve, shut up. I couldn't remember hating milk but I can remember your taste, your smell. No, I don't remember whatever we did, but the feeling of your skin under my fingers is here, burned into my mind, something primal, natural. So, whatever it was we told ourselves almost a century ago please don't try and sell it to me now.”

“I was only telling you, that...” Steve tried, deeply confused, cheeks flushed, eyes a little too wide and his hand deliciously trembling under Bucky's.

“That's the thing. Stop talking. Everything is so loud inside my head, all the time. But you... You are instinct, my body is attracted to you, but it's not physical, it's like something electrical, a jolt I still can't place, so please, make this the only thing that won't be loud in my head but that I can only feel?” 

Steve looked on the verge of tears, Bucky felt on the verge of breaking in thousands of little pieces. 

It was too much and Bucky didn't even know what it was, but he pressed his lips against Steve's once more and once more it felt right, complete. 

Painless. 

There was no horrible attachment to that feeling. There wasn't pain or fear. There was just something burning deep into his soul.

“Steve,” he pressed his forehead against the one of his friend, “I'm far from being able to do that,” he confessed because it felt like he was cheating, riling Steve up for no reason.

“I don't care,” Steve offered back, he turned his hand, grabbed Bucky's and brought it to his lips, kissing gently the scratched knuckles. 

“I can't even promise I'll stay around, so please forget all that, forget what I just did,” Bucky pleaded. At that point, it felt even worse to hurt Steve. He felt like the only thing he couldn't do. Like he'd fight anyone wanting to hurt Steve. 

He had been an idiot. How could he have given Steve something like that to then deny it to him a minute later? 

Steve laughed, once more he got closer to his lips, but he didn't kiss him, like that was something he wanted to leave for Bucky to decide. 

“I didn't forget while under the ice, I didn't forget when I woke up believing you dead, you think I want to forget now, what I felt for you? What I'll always feel for you.” 

“It's no longer me, Steve. Maybe you'll hate who I'll be. Actually, you should already hate who I am, I did things...” 

“Bucky, no. We won't go there now. It's something so huge, you really feel like having the first discussion here?” To be honest Bucky felt like not having that discussion ever, nowhere. He felt like having Steve around was too much. Because Steve was the only thing, person, he wanted, the only one his mind went back to search for some peace, and it felt wrong. 

No, he couldn't totally lie to himself like that. It felt scary, not wrong. Nothing felt wrong around Steve. 

It felt like everything would be different and easier around Steve and he wasn't sure he was ready for that. 

“I'm staying at an abandoned safe-house,” he confessed. He could give him at least that. 

Steve nodded.

“I've guessed. We got a list of those, but I didn't check them, I promised you I wasn't coming after you.”

“Thank you,” Bucky murmured, unable to really say how much that meant to him. Steve had respected his will, he had left him alone, “Maybe come back with me? You could stay a little while, if you want?” 

Steve laughed and without even knowing why Bucky was suddenly laughing too, it felt almost easy, it felt like it was freeing his chest from something heavy. 

“I won't let you eat pizza.”

“I made some yesterday, I fear you'll have to eat the leftovers,” Bucky crossed the tiny space still dividing his lips from Steve's and kissed him, lightly. 

The feeling still made no sense to him, he still couldn't fully place it, but it was a good one, better than pizza and chocolate pancakes.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr I'm cmorgana, not that you need to add me or anything, I'm not so interesting lol


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